Bold predictions for the future of IT from Dave Wright.

Chief innovation officer at ServiceNow.

According to a 2018 survey of 20,000 Microsoft customers, just 22 percent of employees said they felt highly productive on the job—and these were people at companies Microsoft defined as having “strong digital cultures.” At other companies, just 10 percent felt empowered by technology.

We are on the cusp of a new era today, when IT departments can be measured not on how efficiently they operate but on how well they help the people and the businesses they serve.

How will this new world be different? I predict that five years from now, success will be measured on the IT department’s ability to:

Prevent IT failures with self-healing systems. 

Rather than wait for a problem to arise, systems will use sophisticated analytics to diagnose themselves. Your failing storage arrays and network switches will be replaced before they fail. When problems do occur, machine learning technology will take a first pass at resolving them by analyzing what measures have worked in similar conditions in the past.

Become trusted advisors to the businesses.

Companies will achieve a new yin-yang of tactical and strategic balance, where technologists work in unison to produce continuous software for the always-on world of cloud. The businesses will get greater control, transparency, security, agility, flexibility and governance.

Eliminate the need for Level 1 tickets.

Talented people will no longer spend their days resetting passwords, fixing printers or unfreezing PCs. Of course, more complex problems such as cybersecurity breaches will still occur. But companies will have developed repeatable processes to deal with the simple fixes that cause employee headaches. When new annoyances emerge, they will require IT workers’ attention only until the AI systems have figured out automated solutions.

Create entirely new customer experiences.

As time spent on basic care and feeding of the infrastructure declines, IT will be able to spend more time taking advantage of emerging technologies such as mobile, virtual- and augmented-reality, voice and gesture-based interfaces.

Read the full article here – http://spr.ly/6010EcU8j

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