The entire ICT industry has been focussed for the past two decades and more on making interfaces simpler for users. Well, that has been the marketing message and in general the major vendors of both hardware and software have tried to follow through. ‘Easy to use…’ is probably the most used mantra in consumer and in business tech products. The flood of mobile apps in recent years suggests we have actually got there. If they were not as easy to use and, to be blunt, as nearly fool proof as they are, they would simply die in an ultra-competitive and crowded market. The lessons learned have been translated into the interfaces with big sibling applications, notably those business ones that link users to centralised data and systems.
On the other hand, all of our ICT systems have grown progressively more powerful and inherently more complex. Compare, just as an easy example, smart analytics or even business intelligence with reporting in traditional financial accounting or even ERP packages. At a higher level, think of Big Data and astrophysics and meteorology and in-memory analytics for real time fraud detection. Not to mention the National Security Agency. Back down in gritty business reality, mobile device management has proven a real challenge, gathering complexity even as the devices and apps have grown deceptively ‘simple’.
We have succeeded in pushing the complexity into the back ends of our systems, into centralised and usually virtualised computers. Just to keep things moving along, our data storage and networking have segued nicely into ‘software-defined,’ meaning more moving parts than anything electromechanical ever had. As for multi-core processors, they are about the simplest elements in our current computing systems.
Specialists needed
Centralising the complexity in turn means that is has become ever more specialist across a growing range of ICT elements, categories and skills. Very few if any non-ICT industry enterprises can any longer justify or afford to employ an in-house team that will have advanced specialisations across its range of ICT deployment. Some functions will have them. Supply chains and logistics spring to mind, advanced manufacturing systems perhaps, all forms of CAD and there is room for leading edge development talent in the movie and games makers.
But generally in business today managed service providers, consultants and other outsourced experts are literally the only realistic way to go. At the same time there are emerging areas within organisations that do demand a thorough grasp of complex systems, notably perhaps business analytics and data science, potentially information security responsibilities, and then whatever becomes of the evolving role of the CIO or strategic leadership team in ICT.
Virtualisation and then cloud computing form the exemplar of new (or newly revived) technology strategies that were simple in concept and hype but have proven as they developed into multiple strands that complexity evolves like organic life. In ICT, as in nature, everything soft also evolves.
Simple interfaces
VMware’s Joe Baguley, VP and CTO for EMEA, says simply: “As soon as you simplify the user interfaces that implies further complexity in the system itself. Less skill or even intelligence is required of the users but that is balanced by more intelligence in the device or system. The top business systems in industry today are those that focus on the business and user needs, not the requirements of the technology. Increasingly complex ICT systems are being developed to deliver a simple experience to the users.
“So we are seeing a steep rise in the skills around IT architecture, an huge area that in many respects hardly existed in the past when we bought systems that were delivered and then with some training we operated. Today we have systems with many more moving parts, changing and developing all the time, so we need architects. In VMware we talk about ‘One Cloud’ but what we mean is multiple clouds brought together for a customer to be managed as one.
“That in turn could be multiple services from multiple providers,” he points out. “Essentially, the levels of abstraction are moving further up the stack with a lot of intelligence built in. As software companies we are trying to solve the automation problem for IT and that is a whole new skill set.
All of this is being driven by scale. We are doing more computing at a bigger scale and across many more activities than ever before. I think it is probably not a question of less people being required so much as each person being responsible for a greater order of magnitude and much wider range of ICT.
“Automating the routine stuff is basic but then we get to the next levels where ICT continues to be exciting. The skills will be in automation and then orchestrating all of that to deliver value through performance. Look at the latest advances at the top end, DevOps and things like that. Today’s software developers literally have no cares at all about infrastructure. It’s just an on-demand, automated resource that is called up and deployed through software.”
The higher, the fewer
All of which does suggest the beginning of a skills split in ICT, with the leading edge moving higher in value and scarcity and the routine things becoming ever more commoditised. “I like to think of it more as two speeds of innovation,” says John Abel, Oracle leader in UK and Ireland for engineered systems and public technology cloud. “IT leaders have to ask if their innovation speed requires them to jump a skills gap, a deficit in capability, the delivery model or whatever? When I touch something in my ICT environment, is the complexity going to starve my innovation for what the business needs?”
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