Published on the 28/07/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
The IT shop floor faces the sort of radical overhaul that factory floors endured two decades ago – and about two thirds of current IT roles will disappear as enterprises disrupt themselves…
That was the salutary message from Gartner research director Nathan Wilson at the analyst’s Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit held in Sydney last week. While agile approaches to software development are all the rage, as enterprises seeks ways to respond to digital disruption by disrupting itself, the human impact can be overlooked.
“This is not about how your company survives this revolution, this is about how you survive this revolution,” said Wilson who went on to quote J. Paul Getty who warned that “In times of rapid change experience could be your worst enemy.
Wilson said that while IT professionals had weathered decades of new technologies and enterprise fads, this was a much more profound change and warned that between 10 and 20 percent of IT professionals would not be able to successfully transition from their old roles to the new world of agile.
There is however, hope for today’s project managers, development managers, applications architects and enterprise architect – if they are prepared to make some changes to their traditional approach to IT, according to Wilson.
Project managers for example, who are able to switch from focusing on a strictly defined product outcome, to instead deliver “something of value on time and on budget” without demanding control of change and assigning work may be able to morph into product owners on the business side of the house, or agile project managers.
However, Wilson warned that as a rule, “They make lousy scrum masters,” because they confuse the daily standup meeting, which is intended to identify bottlenecks and come up with workarounds, for a weekly progress meeting which measures performance against a fixed target.
Development managers who often were skilled at enabling and growing staff, and defusing conflict could potentially take on scrum master or team lead roles, if able to transition from being a manager and becoming a leader – or as Wilson more narrowly defined it “a servant leader” prepared to do what it takes to smooth the way for co-workers.
Application architects had a clear opportunity in the agile world if they were prepared to design solutions for velocity and the unknown. Wilson said that applications architects had to accept that there were no longer any five year roadmaps to steer them, instead they had to be prepared to design for an uncertain future.
Enterprise architects meanwhile needed to overcome a tendency to tell business what it could or could not do if they were to successfully transition into new roles such as digital strategists, change catalysts, visionaries or ecosystem architects.
Wilson said that as a general rule IT professionals who successfully transitioned to the brave new world of more agile systems development would be “experiment friendly and data driven” and both learn to trust the enterprise they worked for, and earn its trust by delivering business value with every release.
“Business value is the primary measure of progress,” he concluded.
