Don't get us wrong: In today's quickly evolving tech world, it's easy to
get lost chasing the turbulent present moment. The pace of change can
be dizzying, and keeping up on everything that's emerging in IT today
can drive even the most devoted tech worker to distraction.
But IT pros who don't take the time to lift their heads and assess the
likely IT landscape five years out may be asking for career trouble.
Because one fact is clear: Organizations of all stripes are increasingly
moving IT infrastructure to the cloud. In fact, most IT pros who've
pulled all-nighters, swapping in hard drives or upgrading systems while
co-workers slept, probably won't recognize their offices' IT
architecture -- or the lack thereof -- in five years.
This shift will have a broad impact on IT's role in the future -- how
departments are structured (or broken up), who sets the technical vision
(or follows it), and which skills rise to prominence (or fall away
almost entirely).
Here we'll look at how the cloud is changing the way IT departments work
and how, five years from now, staff and managers will need to adapt to a
cloud-driven environment.
Cutting the wires
When you step off the elevator at the office or data center five years
from now, what will you see? Fewer servers and fewer co-workers, most
likely. Maintaining on-premises data centers is a costly endeavor, much
more so than connecting to the cloud. If the current trend toward moving
infrastructure to the cloud is any indication, organizations that
haven't already done so will carefully consider those expenses -- and
many will ultimately decide to trim them over the next five years.
"IT managers will have to support applications, not equipment. They'll
have to be flexible, adaptable, and inclusive." -- Chris McKewon,
founder and chief architect, Xceptional Networks
The skills necessary to thrive in IT will evolve as well.
"Ten years ago, IT staff were physically plugging special storage cables
into special switches," says Mathew Lodge, vice president in VMware's
cloud services group. "Today they're allocating virtual storage volumes
across the network, and some applications simply do their own storage
allocation via APIs. The future is about enabling the deployment and
consumption of cloud services, not installing, configuring, and managing
stacks."
"Cloud services are disrupters," concurs Jim Rogers, CMO at unified
communications and cloud services company iCore Networks. "They disrupt
the idea that IT departments need to spend most of their time on-site
performing mundane tasks. IT departments now have more viable options to
outsource and automate these tasks than ever before."
As companies' infrastructure needs move increasingly to the cloud, so too will jobs dedicated to maintaining racks.
"IT managers will need good network engineers, help desk staff, security
managers, and business analysts," says Chris McKewon, founder and chief
architect of IT consulting company Xceptional Networks. "But they won't
need server/storage engineers, systems administrators, or data center
managers."
The result will be a fundamental shift in IT's overarching mission at
most organizations, with the support-and-maintain mind-set giving way to
a more strategic, software-centric vision for IT. In fact, the IT staff
of the future is likely to need the skills of a businessperson to stay
current, as their company's software requirements and the options for
satisfying them will be deep, varied, and changing quickly.
"The days of server-hugging, deep domain expertise, and IT-only
certifications and training are long gone." -- Tim Prendergast, CEO and
founder, Evident.io
"IT managers will have to support applications, not equipment," McKewon
says. "They'll have to be flexible, adaptable, and inclusive. It will be
difficult to set standards on what hardware will and won't work. The
users will do that for them. And cloud-based single sign-on will become
one of the most important elements to a successful cloud strategy. Users
don't want to manage 50 login names and passwords for 50 different
applications."
"The IT department won't need to be onsite monitoring and recovering
devices and systems to ensure they're ready for use," says iCore's
Rogers. "Instead, the IT professionals can spend more time as strategic
planners and business analysts who ensure their organizations are
structured appropriately to support cloud-based office communications.
They'll be responsible for vendor management and integration processes."
And, he says, IT pros "will be educators, hosting essential end-user
trainings for colleagues."
Tim Prendergast, formerly of Adobe and now CEO and founder of AWS
infrastructure security firm Evident.io, sees more crossover roles in
the future.
"They'll look like today's devops and full-stack engineer roles,"
Pendergrast says. "We'll see IT become less-siloed ... and heavily
staffed by software engineers. Staff in existing roles will have the
opportunity to grow and embrace new technologies and practices for the
new era of cloud computing, and take advantage of the value found in
rapid iteration environments. The days of server-hugging, deep domain
expertise, and IT-only certifications and training are long gone."
That said, not all legacy systems will disappear. In fact, some may
remain critically important to the business for years to come, whether
IT likes it or not. And somebody will need to care for and feed them.
"Many project managers continue to focus on battling tech debt because
of old technology, bad technology decisions, and one-off technology
patches that continue to drive complexity and reduce speed," says Curt
Jacobsen, principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "This battle will be
inevitable -- and IT managers will be managing those legacy issues for a
long time."
IT roles in flux
Here's the big question: As the cloud continues to gain traction, will
companies need a fully staffed IT department? As you may have guessed,
few believe the IT department will disappear. Companies will still
require talented staff who can -- at the very least -- manage systems
integration. But an IT department five years from now will need to keep
pace with nearly constant change.
"The more complex and interconnected these cloud environments are going
to become, the higher amount of a general understanding and knowledge of
how it all works together will be required from IT teams." -- John
Matthews, CIO, ExtraHop
"I will say that I think the number of implementation and ops-focused
roles will decrease, and those IT staff will have to switch to a
strategic mind-set," says Roman Stanek, CEO of GoodData. "Leaders who
were once focused on operations will have the opportunity to dive more
deeply into the blending of business need with technologies, data
science, data monetization. IT will no longer be the people who try to
manage your database; they'll be the people who are thinking of new ways
to monetize, share, and use your data for organization-wide success."
James Quin, senior director at B-to-B marketing firm CDM Media, says
he's already seeing radical changes in how IT departments operate and
how companies are structuring them.
"The IT department isn't going away, and the role of the CIO isn't going
to be marginalized. But as more workloads shift to the cloud, the
construction of the IT department, by necessity, must change away from
traditional roles to those more focused on vendor, business, security,
and service management," Quin says. "This doesn't mean that development
and administration jobs go away, just that there are fewer of them."
"There will be a cross-pollination between development and IT
operations, with IT teams becoming much more application- and
developer-savvy, and dev teams understanding the impacts of development
choices on operations." -- Mathew Lodge, vice president, VMware cloud
services group
The jobs that remain, Quin says, will focus on what he calls the "shim"
layer that integrates different public cloud services with a few
applications that must remain in-house. These could include highly
sensitive corporate (or scientific) data or medical records and images,
for example.
John Matthews, CIO of IT operations analytics company ExtraHop, is a
20-year veteran of the industry. He says he's seen this sort of sea
change before.
"Like 10 years ago, where we had vertical specialties around things like
phone systems, we will now employ vertical experts who are 100 percent
dedicated to how to make things work in cloud IT environments such as
AWS and Azure," Matthews says. "Specific names of IT positions and what
their roles entail will change, but the function will be the same as
today -- or even 10 years ago. There will be roles best suited for the
general IT knowledge worker, and there will be those that require a
specialist's touch. For example, a lab manager's role might morph and be
70 percent focused on managing workloads in a system like AWS, which
will provide them with additional tools to take on more tasks across the
network."
This is where the cloud's supposed push-button simplicity gives way to a
key facet of IT work in the years to come: the ability to navigate the
complexity of intermixed cloud environments.
"As these projects will span across both on-prem and cloud resources,
the legal aspects of data privacy, data sovereignty, and cryptography --
who has access to keys -- will all come into play as much as IT
engineering." -- Steve Shah, VP of product management, Citrix
"The more complex and interconnected these cloud environments become,
the higher amount of a general understanding and knowledge of how it all
works together will be required from IT teams," Matthews says. "IT will
still need someone who understands and specializes in certain aspects
like storage. These departments will also need their personnel to
understand how storage works across an entire complex cloud environment
and the different aspects of what that relational environment entail.
The days of simple technology verticals are over. If you want to build
it, maintain it, or fix it, you have to be able to see and understand
how it all connects together."
Projecting the future
Some experts see the cloud benefiting the IT department by paving the
way for staffers to expand their roles, doing more development work,
coding, tying systems together, and creating flexible applications that
resemble platforms.
"For a long time, a lot of what went into making the business successful
was the meat-and-potatoes tasks like racking and stacking," says
ExtraHop's Matthews. "But the transition away from those traditional ops
tasks has already happened. Today, the most important thing IT can do
for the business is to configure devices and applications to maximize
performance, control access, and ensure that devices, systems, and
applications are secure."
VMware's Lodge sees a shift in philosophy, where IT collaborates with
the business side to choose what applications are needed, then supports
those applications and ensures compliance.
"[IT staff] will become the 'ops' part of 'devops' because development
teams don't want to do ops -- they want to develop code," Lodge says.
"So there will be a cross-pollination between development and IT
operations, with IT teams becoming much more application- and
developer-savvy, and dev teams understanding the impacts of development
choices on operations."
Steve Shah, VP of product management at Citrix, sees a rising need for
security skills in the years to come, given IT's expanding role in
development and automation projects.
"As these projects will span across both on-prem and cloud resources,"
Shah says, "the legal aspects of data privacy, data sovereignty, and
cryptography -- who has access to keys -- will all come into play as
much as IT engineering."
"The reality is, IT departments are already evolving. In five years,
they'll look more like miniature software companies, with staff
dedicated to solving their customers' problems." -- Curt Jacobsen,
principal, PricewaterhouseCoopers
Sean Jennings, co-founder and senior vice president at cloud-based
enterprise software company Virtustream, sees new opportunities for IT
staff, optimizing business applications for mobile workforces and making
the most of company data.
"IT managers will help mine the vast troves of unstructured data that
organizations have … resulting in increased collaboration with other
departments," Jennings says. "In many cases, IT managers will be
reporting to line-of-business executives and even up to the C-suite --
from the CTO to CIO to CFO and even CEO. We'll see an evolution in the
skills required of IT, with increased emphasis on creative thinking,
problem-solving, and collaboration."
In the first half of the 20th Century, a wide range of
futurists, science fiction writers and others predicted what life would
be like in the Year 2000 and beyond. Many of those concepts made such an
impact that they left an indelible mark on the public's imagination.
In fact, many people assume that we're still slowly
progressing toward that future. But I'm here to tell you that the real
future has already arrived. More than that, the predicted future is
boring and inferior to our amazing reality.
Let's compare elements of yesterday's future with what's actually happening now.
Pet robots
In the future-obsessed 1920s, '30s and '40s, futurists
commonly believed that robotic pets would become normal. A few
prototypes were even mocked up and displayed at World's Fairs. One robot
dog called Philidog was created in 1928. The most famous was Sparko, a robotic dog created in 1940.
They were
actually mechanical contraptions that responded in limited ways to
various inputs. They achieved slow, clumsy movement with internal gears
and wires. Futurists no doubt assumed that computers would eventually be
involved, and that mechanical dogs would evolve into robot dogs.
But no futurist could have predicted the massive computer
power controlling today's home robot pets. The most recent example is
the BB-8.
Unveiled last week by Sphero, the $150 BB-8 is a pet robot modeled after a droid in the upcoming Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, which opens in December.
Sphero worked with Disney on the design of the robot
featured in the movie, then got the rights to make a branded toy pet
based on the movie character.
The BB-8 has a magnetically attached head. (Sphero's
marketing material says the head is attached not with magnets but with
"the force" -- or a "pseudo-inverted pendulum mechanism.") As the
ball-shaped body rolls along, the head stays generally on top of the
BB-8 while at the same time appearing to look around nervously and
curiously.
The BB-8 rolls around on its own and can be
remote-controlled or run through user-determined programs. It even
responds to voice commands. (Hilariously, it runs away in a panic when
you say, "It's a trap!")
Sphero's droid is also capable of simulated "holographic
communication," which you can see as an augmented reality feature via
your phone's camera and screen.
The "brains" of the BB-8 is your Android
or iOS smartphone running the BB-8 app, which will no doubt gain new
powers and abilities with each new update. The processing power for the
BB-8 (your phone) vastly exceeds anything imaginable until recently.
In comparison, the mid-century futurists could not have predicted or imagined even the IBM
Deep Blue supercomputer that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in
1997. Deep Blue was capable of 11.38 GFLOPS (a GFLOP is 1 billion
floating point operations per second), which is puny compared to the
115.2 GFLOPS that the iPhone 6's A8 SoC delivers.
So when your BB-8 is rolling around amusing the family, it's
being powered by the equivalent of more than 10 IBM supercomputers of
the late 1990s.
So yeah, we have the predicted robot pets. And they're probably way more advanced than the futurists predicted.
Jet packs
Futurists also envisioned jet packs -- apparently believing
that lashing a high-powered engine to your back would be a viable form
of transportation. The jet pack idea was so compelling, in fact, that it
was brought to fruition decades ago. The jet packs that, say, Nick Macomber flies in demonstrations are essentially perfected versions of the concept from the 1960s and '70s.
The jet packs based on the decades-old predictions keep you in the
air for 30 seconds or so. They're also dangerous. The new version of the
old jet pack vision is off-limits to the public.
Compare that with the much-better jet-pack-like concepts
that are a reality, and are available to anyone who has the money and
courage to use them. For example, check out this video of Yves Rossy and
Vince Reffet, who fly jetpacks combined with hard-wing wingsuits to fly
like Superman.
And next year, if you've got $150,000 to spend, you'll be able to buy the world's first commercially available jet pack, the Martin Jetpack.
Flying cars
Dozens of actual flying car products have hit the market, or
will soon. Most of these are more accurately described as "roadable
aircraft," because they're basically airplanes that have fold-up wings
and can be driven on roads.
The creation of flying cars hasn't solved the problem of
where you can fly them. Pilot's licenses and advanced training are
required. Airspace, weather, obstacle avoidance and all the standard
factors involved in flying planes apply. So the long-predicted dream of
escaping traffic jams by taking off from the freeway and soaring into
the sky can't happen because it's both dangerous and illegal. So most
people who could own roadable aircraft don't. These vehicles are
inferior airplanes and inferior cars. It's much better, it turns out, to
buy a real car plus a real airplane.
But one of the core predicted attributes of yesterday's
flying car of the future was the ability to fly to places where there's
no airport or runway. And that vision is quickly becoming a reality.
Two companies are working on vertical-takeoff airplanes for the consumer market. One is the TF-X from Terrafugia. The other is the TriFan 600 from XTI.
These airplanes will both let you fly as you would
in an airplane and land in your front yard (regulations permitting) --
or on a helicopter pad on top of a building in a major city.
Food in pill form
Another favorite idea of the 20th Century futurists was
technology that would free us from the problems and hassles of eating.
The concept was that all the nutrition you might ever need could be
delivered in capsules, thus relieving us of the need to expend time and
energy on shopping, cooking and cleaning up.
A Silicon Valley venture-backed startup called Soylent
is selling that same vision in powder and liquid form. It explicitly
touts the benefit of saving time. And it's enhancing that vision by
promoting the environmental friendliness and low cost of its product
(you can survive on Soylent for about $70 per month).
But we have something now that's far better than food pills
or even Soylent: We have real food that's really good. A '50s-era
futurist wouldn't have been able to imagine the quality and variety of
food we have today. (Turns out people enjoy eating. Go figure.)
The reality is that much of our world today meets or exceeds the expectations of yesterday's futurists.
I'm not sure exactly when the future happened, but it did.
So I'm going to say it: The future is here. And it's vastly better and
more exciting than anything anyone predicted.
By Will
Yakowicz Will Yakowicz is a staff writer for Inc. magazine. He has
reported from the West Bank and Moscow for Tablet Magazine ; covered
business, crime, and local politics for The Brooklyn Paper ; and was the
editor of Park Slope Patch. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. @
WillYakowicz Staff writer, Inc. @ WillYakowicz
In a restaurant in Kunshan, China, more than a
dozen robots cook and deliver food to customers. Will robots replace
every job? Find out what skill humans are better at than robots.
IMAGE: Getty Images
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As artificial intelligence advances, so does the human fear
of being replaced by a computer. It's a fear that goes back to the
Industrial Revolution, when textile workers protested new technology by
destroying machines that could do their jobs quicker and more
efficiently.
Now that robots (literally) walk the earth, there is an
ever-more-pressing question of whether they will spell the end of
employment for humans or actually just complement us and make us more
productive. But even if it's the latter, some jobs have already
vanished, and others are sure to follow. So what functions will these
robots not be able to perform?
A Harvard Business Review article details a new
National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, which finds robots
have not been replacing jobs that require a quintessential human skill:
social communication. The paper, by David J. Deming of the Harvard
Graduate School of Education, explains:
While computers perform cognitive tasks of rapidly
increasing complexity, simple human interaction has proven difficult to
automate. Since 1980, jobs with high social skill requirements have
experienced greater relative growth throughout the wage distribution.
Moreover, employment and wage growth has been strongest in jobs that
require high levels of both cognitive skill and social skill.
"The days of being able to plug away in isolation on a
quantitative problem and be paid well for it are increasingly over,"
Deming tells HBR. "You need both types of skills."
According to Deming, jobs that require social skills grew by
24 percent from 1980 to 2012 while math-intensive jobs grew by only 11
percent. The jobs under the greatest threat of automation, he says, are
routine-based positions like those of factory workers and filing
clerks.
Deming took data from a longitudinal survey that tracked
respondents from adolescence into their mid-50s through test scores,
sports or club participation in high school, and adult employment and
income, to compare wages of people who have high social skills with
those who have low social skills.
While it's not a perfect study, the results are interesting.
"People who have higher social skills, as measured by the survey, earn
more money--even after controlling for things like their education,
their cognitive skills (measured by standardized scores), what type of
job they're in, etc.--than those with poor social skills," HBR
writes. "There seems to be a positive return to social skills in the
labor market, according to the data, and that return is relatively
greater when people are in jobs that require more interaction with
others."
We still don't know if robots will help us or hurt us in the
long run, but it's safe to say that if you cultivate your essential
human abilities, a robot will have a hard time replacing you.
