The Future (IS) Worker

Post written by Chris S., Project Manager at Ideaca. Read more about project management on his blog: The Outspoken Data Guy.

If the lines have not already been blurred, they will be…Over the next 10 years business and IS work will undergo a major transformation, largely driven by the Cloud and Data Analytics.

In the next 10 years, internal IS staff will act solely as advisers and managers of cloud services.

As more and more businesses embrace cloud services, IS will be called upon to act as advisers to ensure that these services are managed as efficiently as possible. As a consequence, this will push IS Governance further into the limelight. For years IS has had the notion of charge-back to the business to help manage costs and allocate them to those that use services. This approach has been mired in political push back and logistical challenges around how this would be done in a fair and equitable manner. As we move towards a “Pay for Usage” model in the cloud, these costs will be far easier to allocate back to those that use and hence IS will get a more accurate picture of costs of services and a far better allocation model.

This likely will not sit well with legacy users but the notion of “pay for usage” is so common place with Generation Z that this will be a virtual non issue. With this political hurdle out of the way, the focus can shift to more efficient use of IS resources and to ensure that businesses are getting value.

It is hard to argue with the value of using cloud services. At present there are the usual security and performance questions but over the next few years these concerns will be addresses and we will all have our heads in the clouds.

The new beast - hybrid IS and Business Person

Who is the future (IS) worker? And what skills will they need to bring to the table?

In my opinion the niche where people will have the most success will be with a hybrid of IS and business skills. There is no real debate that the world is increasingly becoming more data driven and the ability to turn data into actionable insights will become more in demand. So what does that mean? It means that workers will need to have 2 very key kills:

a) A deep understanding of the business and b) the ability to analyze data and derive insights.

This phenomenon, coupled with the cloud will allow Business Intelligence services to move closer to the business with IS once again acting as advisers, which is where BI needs to be currently in organizations. Unfortunately it gets stuck into an unnecessary tug of war between IS and the Business.

Bottom line: Business users will have to become more technically savvy as is articulated in Thomas Davenports “Keeping up with the Quants.”

Business Intelligence is weaving its way into our daily lives - it is the age of data.

Building on the above, on a daily basis we are increasingly faced with data that we use to guide our actions, personal or otherwise. Real time traffic signs that tell us how long it takes to get somewhere, integrated budgeting software in our banking site that monitor our daily spending and alert us to certain conditions that we are interested in and feedback about restaurants that we may want to have lunch at. These are just a few examples of where data is used daily to guide our decisions.

 Bottom line: Data and analysis are becoming a way of life and will continue to forge its way into the mainstream.