Kathy Gibson is at the Deloitte Tech Trends launch – Digital disruption is not going away for at least the next 15 years – and organisations need to gear up to ensure they take advantage of new technologies.
“Even if you are not engaging with it, these new technologies are going to hit you,” says Hans van Grieken, EMEA technology research and insights leader in Deloitte’s global CIO programme.
“You have to ask if your models are sufficient to cater to these technologies, because technology arrives and affects everyone regardless of whether they want it to or not.
“Should the technology operating model not adapt and cater to these waves of new technologies which are not going to go away?” he asks.
The world has effectively moved from IT to digital – but the next phase is going to be exponential. And it is coming quickly, Van Grieken says.
“What is new is the exponential nature and speed at which technology changes are taking place, moving from a linear pace to an exponential pace.
“Trying to learn how to deal with new technologies once the tipping point is upon us it’s too late,” Van Grieken says. “You need to cater to exponential technologies now.”
For a lot of organisations there is a mismatch between their digital strategy and their existing legacy landscape and technology operating model.
Bimodal strategies can’t work in addressing this, Van Grieken adds. “They have to be brought together.”
Deloitte has identified nine major shifts in in three groups, or waves.
In the first wave, ways of working, agility and speed are vital while boundaries between business and IT needs to blur. The rise of innovation ecosystems will thus be enabled.
Van Grieken points out, however, that there are many different ways of doing all of these things, and different leaders responsible for their implementation.
When it comes to ecosystem, it’s impotent to realise that all parts of the business are parts of complex ecosystem already, while they need to figure out how they fit into the new platforms that are rising.
The second wave, resources, centres around the organisations pool of talent and skills; the organisational DNA; and its governance, funding, risk and risk appetite.
Technology – the third wave – is introducing big trends, Van Grieken adds. These include cloud and virtualisation; data and algorithms; and the convergence of IT and operational technology (OT).
What’s more important than the shifts, though, is how they work together, he points out. Organisations need to figure out which of the shifts is going to be dominant and how this will work with the others.
“We feel these nine shifts are changing the way we trial, scale or fail digital technologies to make the business relevant,” Van Grieken says.