Mobility and consumerization, is creating a shift in the centricity that brings us from being about an employee/end-user's place in their company’s business process, to the company's place in the rest of the employee's life.

As individuals are becoming self-sufficient through the technology at their fingertips, they expect the workplace to have whatever information they need in real time. The ability to securely deliver that kind of immediacy of data to the enterprise is enabled by new technologies – in particular social media, cloud storage, SaaS platforms, noSQL databases, and the merging of the rapidly expanding hardware capabilities that build off the core capabilities of devices such as tablets, smartphone, and laptops.

There is a growing gap between what people can get at work compared to what they expect in terms of immediacy, quality and accessibility. Not only vendors, but employees are having difficulty adjusting service descriptions to ones that can address the provision of these kinds of inclusive needs. Some of the monolithic software providers are continuing to provide out of date, siloed, complicated and irrelevant solutions to problems enterprises no longer have by simply rebranding them. Also, some service providers are slow to assimilate new technology into their respective end-to-end service offerings. This includes the ability to incorporate the growing demands of information security.

The Digitalization Drive is Exciting and Challenging

The challenge comes with the ability to meet the ongoing need to rebuild and/or renovate the core infrastructure while addressing the needs of the rapid demand flow of the digital future. Growing needed talent, particularly with the required digital skill set, developing alternative sourcing relations, streamlining governance processes, and implementing agile methodologies for our development portfolios are critical to effectively deploying the new technology-driven capabilities.

Commoditization of IT

IT professionals have gone through years of what is referred to as the "commoditization of IT." Typically, "keeping the lights on" or "running the enterprise" is an outsourced activity, with our own employees becoming vendor managers and service administrators. Yet most people did not get into to IT to do that. The new technologies that free us from many of the details of how infrastructure and systems are managed gives a new opportunity for IT professionals to become technology brokers, strategists, integration specialists, data miners and service architects. This leads to an enthusiasm for innovation (nurtured by the new technology capabilities) in pulling together solutions that would have previously been unachievable, or even unimaginable. Innovation now follows naturally as we move away from being in the weeds of the vendor management and service delivery management associated with running all our own systems. Moving IT thinking from measuring success by having successfully followed a process, to thinking first about the outcome generated is a significant challenge, but one that stimulates innovation.