The IT practitioner of the future

What does the current state of business and societal flux mean for IT professionals looking to enhance and develop their career? It’s a big and multifaceted question and one which we’ll answer in detail. We’ll consider some new approaches to career planning and to skills development. We’ll look at what this all means for you, for your co-workers, stakeholders and for your team. As you read on, we’ll also explore how the roles, responsibilities and skills we all need will change and grow. We’ll also discuss forward strategies.

The good news is, most people came into technology to innovate, learn, change their workplaces, to grow and to have an impact on the world. The future is going to demand that you bring more of the same. The challenge, as we shall see, will be ensuring your skills and approaches can adapt to, and help you make the most of, technology and its ever-changing nature.  

The history behind today’s flux

The technology sector has more than delivered on its promise of revolutionising the economy and will be one of the most critical growth drivers in years to come. As technology practitioners every one of us can have a huge influence on our organisation’s ability to change, grow and to transform. The pandemic crisis of recent years has certainly brought the skills of technologists right out into centre stage.

It’s amazing what has been achieved in such a short space of time. As Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft said: ‘We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security - we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything.’

Many of us have broken our own records on what was possible, with technology refreshes and projects taking weeks rather than the expected months and years. New technology previously seen as a stretch has been embraced. It’s clear that as practitioners our appetite for change has not abated.

In July the Secretary of State for DCMS stated at the UK government’s Digital Economy Council meeting that the UK technology sector is growing at a faster rate than the economy as a whole. The UK technology sector grew tenfold from 2010-20. Between 2010 and 2020 the number of British unicorns - private tech firms valued at more than $1bn - grew from 8 to 81, while the number of companies nearing unicorn status also grew tenfold.

The council has issued 10 tech priorities and has big plans for technology’s role in driving the government’s levelling up agenda. In September the UK government also released its national AI strategy to building on the big plans it has for the UK to lead the way.

What has changed externally for organisations?

Technology has huge potential to create value in a diverse global society where the workforce is increasingly de-centralised. Outside the workplace it is also changing society and citizens’ lives.

Before the pandemic crisis, a build-up of uncertainty and unpredictability was already present. There was also a demand supply issue and a new expectation from citizens. It was, however, expected that macro-economic forces including digital technology advancement, not a biological force, would bring about the accelerated change we’re experiencing now.

Many now argue that the pandemic was the unofficial closing ceremony of the manual factory model era. The digital evolution we are now seeing played out is transforming businesses from a siloed factory model, where people are cogs in the machine focused on tasks, to something more akin to an adaptive living organism.  

More like something alive, the modern organisation senses its way around its environment. It is one in which workers have adapted and are supported by automation to become value-creating cognitive workers.

As a result, data, intelligence, and the ability to predict are now key assets for the organisation. By focusing on optimising core business processes from an end-to-end perspective, companies are now creating pan-organisational assets.

This shift towards more adaptive organisations has other benefits: it enables companies to acquire resilience and develop adaptability. These are central supports for any organisation operating in uncertain environments, like the continuing pandemic.  

The impact of sustainability

The pandemic has taught us that sustainability means more than considering just the Earth and its natural resources. Rather we need to augment this view, expanding it to embrace a growing list of facets including resilience and personal wellbeing.

Building resilience in our society and businesses so they can survive and thrive in these turbulent times has been essential to maintaining stability. In the second case, a wide range of approaches have been necessary to support individuals to ensure their mental and physical wellbeing. Workplace and societal flux have caused big shifts and invoke much uncertainty in lives. The net result is stress.

This broader perspective is important. It illuminates the value of adopting a planet-profit-people approach. This ‘triple bottom line' encourages us to view sustainability across three dimensions.

Focusing on the planet, profit and people individually is demanding enough. Building back better after the pandemic will also require balance across these dimensions.  

The IT job role - what has changed?

Beyond the societal, workplace and organisational flux we’ve already explored, the technology industry itself is being disrupted.

The technical tools and techniques that are needed to create and deliver IT are becoming ever more integrated and sophisticated. At the same time, more technology capability is being embedded in products and services. This is true across many industrial sectors such as logistics, travel and transport.

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Increasingly technology for core corporate functions such as finance, HR and compute can now be bought in as cloud-based services. Previously these occupied IT practitioners’ time. At the same time the tools and capabilities used to develop and enhance software applications are becoming more democratised, and as a result more directly accessible by non-technical users.

In summary, IT itself is experiencing huge changes in tooling, its use, in what’s possible and in its users’ expectations. 

Alongside this, there are questions being raised about the responsibilities placed on big tech organisations, hardware manufacturers, social media platform providers, communications infrastructures, and all of those promoting rapid advance in the development and delivery of new digital services.

As digital technologies become ever more deeply embedded in our lives, debate about how to address potential negative impacts is increasing. Headline concerns include privacy, ethics and automation of existing jobs. Ethical thinking and practice is a priority focus for most organisations today.

Going forward the IT practitioner must be alert to the societal and sustainability changes that IT is likely to cause. Practitioners must also be prepared to actively look for the consequences of those changes during the planning and implementation phases. They should avoid seeing only the scope of the technology as their boundary.

Managing and developing complex interlinked technology landscapes requires a new level of sophistication as more of our business value is derived from external relationships and ecosystems.

The crisis has therefore brought about the realisation that there is a need to continue to adapt and change business models at an even faster pace. As IT practitioners, being able to understand the opportunities for change using technology is what we do. But it’s harder to operate in a world where everything is changing at the same time, including the tools of your trade.

The IT practitioner, digital transformation and transition

In line with the pace of change and disruptions, IT practitioners have been looked to, and relied upon, to keep what is already in place, whilst undertaking (sometimes large and complex) transformation projects and programmes.

The challenges of these transformations have been well documented over the years (The Mythical Man Month, Death March). They provide a series of lessons learnt for IT practitioners about being adaptive when it comes to delivering and shortening ‘time to value’.

There are many technology options available to us whether that’s pre-packaged and standardised SaaS or low code environments.

For the past few decades, a set of collaboration patterns have emerged that have shaped the way that the IT practitioner and business develop, transition, and innovate.

Innovation and changes have created new types of roles and career pathways. These have opened learning opportunities for the IT practitioner to grow their skills and to embrace continuing professional development.

These range from agile to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Modern technology such as the Raspberry Pi, and the advent of commodity cloud computing has also meant that it’s no longer a requirement to have a specialist capability - you can easily try things out and fail fast safely.

For some businesses it’s not about choice but scale and resilience. Again, the IT practitioner is called on to consider how systems can be engineered so they fail safely and recover quickly.

Increasingly there’s a role to play in reliability engineering. CEOs have learnt that brittle infrastructure and business processes can put them out of business.

At a time when there is so much to be done, the opportunities for building a diverse workforce are huge. The impact that IT practitioners can make goes beyond the scope and diversity of the roles, relationships, tools, techniques, and skills needed to adopt and sustain it.

Increasingly, IT practitioners are involved in the sustainability of businesses and whole industries. You might argue the role of IT practitioners is an increasingly advisory one, focused on helping businesses to understand the benefits of approaches and the trade-offs of the increasing set of viable technology choices.

We all need to encourage organisations to transform, and to think differently about what they need from IT departments.

The challenge will be to create momentum and to motivate all organisations to act sooner rather than later. This makes space for organisations to create, and transition to higher value IT and business roles that are more closely coupled with their strategy, purpose, and ethics.

To be sustainable these transitions need to happen in advance of the IT industry’s ability to automate and commoditise work. Having a viewpoint on the role of the future technology practitioner will be key for organisations if they are going to be able to strategically invest in skills and their workforce

Success and on-going career learning

Having personal impact in our chosen field, to many of us, is important. In a field that’s moving so fast it is then important to have ways to keep up.

For the IT practitioner that means adopting a continuous learning mentality. This  means making learning an everyday activity. Changes in technology and the way knowledge is consumed have opened up learning and enabled it to become more open sourced. This all allows the IT practitioner to think about which pathway is more suitable to them.

Success for future IT practitioners starts with adopting a growth mindset and becoming a lifelong learner. Keeping pace with best practices and technology change requires the future IT practitioner to be both efficient and adept at keeping abreast of technological and method changes.

They must also maintain a network of trusted relationships that can assist with their projects. This network can also help with an understanding of the new skills that are in demand. Finally, they need to acquire and become comfortable with a ‘just in time learning model’.

The term ‘growth mindset’ comes from the studies and theories of Dr Carol Dweck. Dweck suggested that intelligence can be developed and that it can be applied so everyone can reach higher levels of achievement.

Adopting a growth mindset by taking every opportunity to experiment, embrace failure, learn, change, and seek challenges will enable practitioners and businesses to realise their true potential and achieve success.

The growth mindset can be translated into a model for the future IT professional as six traits:

1. Ambitious: They will be driven by a purpose to use IT to solve a challenge that an individual, a firm or society faces.
2. Bold: Willing to re-imagine the current reality using the technology that is available or technology that could be created.
3. Capable: Knowing the skills they need to acquire and knowing from where they can acquire them. And doing so at the point of need and in a just-in-time fashion.
4. Determined: Whilst everyone wants projects completed, the ever-increasing complexity of technology means that problems are inevitable. As such determination is essential. Critically, a trusted network enables determination to flourish.
5. Entrepreneurial: Practitioners should be able to see future technology’s possibilities and also be adept at creating communities who can help them achieve their vision.
6. Foresighted: Having due care and attention for the impacts of actions. This is across both tech and business and with an emphasis on sustainability (business, personal, team, environment)