IT Trends for 2014

As we hopefully to emerge from economic doldrums, what does the coming year have up it sleeve. Ernst and young looked last year at the forth coming opportunities and risks. Their top risk was regulation and compliance, followed by cost cutting and pricing pressure not surprising as going into last year the global economic outlook was still precarious. They also considered managing talent a high risk with businesses being challenged by a lack of qualified staff and many implementing staff development programs. Also they identified emerging technology as a risk, this being inherent in uncertainty.

What Ernst and young saw as emerging opportunities included:

  1. Improving the execution of strategy such as developing internal communication
  2. Investing on process tools and training to achieve greater productivity
  3. Investing in IT including a focus on skills development
  4. Innovating in products, services and operations

Ernst and young advocate embedding innovation into strategy and organisation while identifying about half of organisations as having difficulties in developing that innovative culture. They considered obstacles to innovation as including:

  1. Lack of focus or investment
  2. Conservatism and inflexibly
  3. Lack sufficient expertise

Forrester have provided some soothsaying for the coming year. They see the business world playing catch up with the consumer when it comes to IT. With more BYOD (bring your own device). Business application will increasingly be expected to handle different types of devices anytime any place. If not already the case, software will become the brand as priorities shift further towards digital experience and engagement. A more social media savvy approach will continue to emerge with employees as well as costumers. Systems and software will feature "more agile, collaborative, and adaptive methods for analytics and data sharing". Against this backdrop it suggested that business will wrestle control away from IT and IT will have to adopt a more service orientated architecture. Focus may shift from projects to products and metrics for gauging success will change.

According to the computerworld survey for Hot IT skill for 2014, Programming and Application development remains the top skill in demand for the coming year, with 49% of respondents planning to hire programmers. Next with 37% respondents planning to hire is Help desk/technical support people. This is followed by Networking (31%), Mobile applications and device management (27%) and Project management (25%) and Database Administration (24%).

Comparing to last year's survey, Programmers remain most sought after skill but less than last year where 60% respondents where wanting to hire. Helpdesk, Networking, Database and Mobile Device skills show an increasing demand whereas Project Management has drop from number two last year (40%) to number five, also dropping in demand are security, compliance, governance and Business Intelligence.

Governance and alignment with business objectives and strategy remain considered as important, but with the boosting of the helpdesk, it appears that IT is becoming more productive and less of a question of what we can with it.

1st January 2014 Back to blog Home page

| Duncan Stonebridge. Back