Over the next three years, information technology companies will enter a new phase. As one aspect of the change, these companies will be measured on a different set of metrics. The IT mandate will now stretch beyond the familiar realm of satisfying customers and employees and collaborating with the business and reducing costs to sealing customer relationships, discovering new business value and enabling business agility and innovation, while also ensuring security.
A recent global study involving 1,000 senior IT executives throws considerable light on this future which will impact the IT workforce considerably.
For the survey, senior IT executives of companies with more than 2,000 employees were chosen. These companies are operating in these sectors: financial services, healthcare, insurance, life sciences, manufacturing and retail industries.
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According to the findings of the study, the IT workforce will change in three interconnected ways in the future.
Job automation
In the coming decade, a lot of enterprise IT jobs — indeed, millions of jobs over time — will be automated, but not at a scale or pace that will create the social dislocation that some are predicting, and many more are fearing. Believe it or not, many companies still have highly skilled IT professionals copying and pasting responses to incoming support tickets.
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Automation will free precious IT resources and enable them to focus on activities that require higher-order thinking. Many of the workers displaced thus, would be absorbed into other functions, or would be reskilled for new jobs that are yet to be created. The fear of job loss could be a barrier to automation. Organisations that focus relentlessly on optimising and applying human-centric skills — collaboration, analysis, communication and innovation, to name few — will have a competitive advantage, particularly in terms of attracting and retaining top talent.
Enhanced workforce
For the vast majority of IT jobs, the new machine will actually enhance and protect employment. This means the employment will remain, and these jobs will be delivered with greater output and/or quality. Moving to the cloud, automating back-and-middle-office processes and workflows, and leveraging bots to address employee and customer support will not only eliminate mundane technical and maintenance tasks, but also drive greater operational efficiency.
For example, Amazon Web Services uses Artificial Intelligence to improve employee efficiency and decision-making by suggesting the best places to focus their attention each day. IT personnel will come to view the new machine as their trusted colleague.
New IT roles
New jobs will focus on IT mastery. What’s often overlooked while examining the big picture of employment levels is the growth of new jobs. IT decision makers believe that entirely new professions will be created, driving employment in fields we can’t currently envision (imagine trying to describe a “database administrator” to somebody in 1955). IT organisations have much to look forward to if they understand exactly what the new machine can and cannot do and how it will impact the future of their work.
By one popular estimate, more than half of the children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist. Companies such as Royole Corporation are developing flexible, thin screens that will help the future of human-machine interaction to evolve. This may lead to new job titles such as “human-machine interaction analyst” to manage this new engagement. We believe many new IT roles, such as those around Edge Computing and Quantum Computing, will emerge in the future.
Hybrid IT staff will act more as consulting partners, providing technical and integration services and rapid prototyping and testing ideas for the business. Companies that believe there will be no change in IT’s roles and responsibilities are making a fatal mistake. Within the overall enterprise IT workforce, there will be significant job transition (often creating skills mismatches), and figuring out “what to do” within this churn will create winners and losers. No one can escape the gravitational pull of the new machine.
Workplace automation blended with human intelligence will be the future of work. There is not much time left, but with the willingness to change and the impetus to act, leaders of tomorrow are sure to win the race and stay on top.
( Manish Bahl is Senior Director at the Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant. )