CSC Smart Business UK Edition February - Future focus
Future focus
CSC's Lem Lasher reveals the three key trends he believes will shape the year ahead
Consumerisation, virtualisation and a repurposing of the IT department's role are the three big trends which CSC's Chief Innovation Officer, Lem Lasher, believes will shape the year ahead.
In a video interview posted at the start of the year, Lasher succinctly summarised his predictions for the big issues in 2012.
1. Consumerisation of IT
The days of the IT department selecting and handing out the only equipment used within a company are drawing to an end. Employees are becoming increasingly savvy at understanding the computing and telecommunications devices they need to run their home life and work more efficiently in and out of the office.
More and more, employees are expecting to be able to make the decision over which devices they use, particularly around smartphone and tablet PCs.
Hence Lasher predicts the intensification of this trend will be a major influence on IT strategies in 2012.
"We're going to see this continuing consumerisation of technology, by that I mean, the adoption of consumer based consumer derived technology at the front end of the enterprise," he predicts.
"Companies are going to continue to adopt devices, they're going to adopt business models and different types of service offerings that are coming out of the consumer space in to the front end of the enterprise."
2. Virtualisation to continue
IT budgets are always being examined for areas where efficiencies can be made and Lasher believes the current interest in virtualisation will gather extra momentum in the year ahead. This movement will not be solely about technology but will also encourage great adoption of shared services.
"There's going to be an intensification of the use of virtualisation to get economies of scale across all spectra of technology: the networks, the data centres, the servers, the PC and even organisational virtualisation," Lasher explains.
"We see increasing use of shared services to be able to get economies of scale and take advantage of the technology. That's going to be pervasive across all enterprises, large and small. It's going to be quite a robust market we see going forwards."
3. Repurposing the IT organisation
The influence of consumerisation and virtualisation are two of the major factors behind an overall shift within IT departments to ‘repurpose' their role and establish how they can best offer value to the overall business, Lasher concludes.
"As the IT organisation tries to respond to this bow wave of consumerised technology coming in at the front end, and the widespread restructuring of the architecture and the technology in the usage of virtualisation, we think there will be organisation governance and process changes and repurposing of the IT organisation in terms of how they add value to the company."
The year ahead, then, is set to see changes to the IT organisation, which Lasher predicts will be "fundamental".
Read the Leading Edge Forum's article on Preparing for a Post-PC World
Learn more about CSC’s work in: Shared services