Predicting the Future of ITSM — How Did We Do? Part 4: The Role of IT

In 2015, we published five predictions of how IT would change by 2020. Here’s a look at the fourth of those predictions, and our take on where we are today.

Back in 2015, we published five predictions of how IT would change by 2020. So, how did we do? Let’s take a look.

Over the course of this week, we’ll publish one prediction and result per day. Monday’s post was Part 1: The Work, Tuesday’s was Part 2: The Tech, and yesterday we published Part 3: The Role of Support.

In our original post, How IT Will Change by 2020 – Research from HDI, we elaborated on five topics of forecasting presented in Foresight Is 2020: Industry Predictions from the HDI Strategic Advisory Board, written by Roy Atkinson and Craig Baxter.

Here’s a look back at the fourth of the predictions made in that post five years ago, and our take on where we are actually at today.

The Role of IT

2015 prediction: Employees want the same consumer technology experience they have in their personal lives to carry over to work, and so they will increasingly use openly accessible cloud technologies to build their own solutions in the workplace. IT departments will have to leverage shadow IT and/or provide comparable services at comparable costs to achieve their business goals.

2020 reality: Though shadow IT is still somewhat of a concern, IT groups are getting more control over those environments.

Generally, enterprises still let people spin up projects in Amazon, but now have corporate policies around what their employees can and can’t do in that environment, in order to maintain data privacy and security.

The approach has shifted from trying to fight shadow IT to enabling it “within a box” so IT can (mostly) control that activity.

In addition, organizations have had help from the service providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others who enable IT to set up corporate accounts that allow employees to do certain things inside those worlds without having complete freedom.

So, while shadow IT is still around, the response has shifted, and vendors of all types are supporting that. They want to empower business users to create solutions and solve problems, but within “guard rails” established by IT. The IT function becomes a problem-solving resource, but not the only one.

Conclusion: IT has changed its approach to shadow IT as predicted, though the role of vendors in assisting with building those guard rails appears to have been less foreseen.

How do you think we, and HDI, did with this prediction? Leave your thoughts in the contact form at the top of this page or reach out on Twitter if you’ve got feedback for us.

NOTE: These posts would not have been possible without the expert input of Kinetic Data’s director of customer services, Matt Howe.