Five Things for 2025 and People to Follow

This is my last newsletter of the year and with it I'm going to hit you with five themes that every tech leader is needing to consider in 2025. This past year has been a bit of a whirlwind to say the least, but many companies struggling but others doing really well. The momentum from AI has gone up, down, and up... while the need to consistently serve the needs of the business has been as strong as ever.

Theme 1: Employee AI Adoption at Scale

The first theme is all about empowering every employee in your organization to be their best self by using innovative technology, most importantly a diverse set of AI tools. In a very specific sense, we see 2025 as the year of Copilot and Copilot Studio adoption at scale. In 2024 we saw companies start and gain some momentum, but many that we've talked with are planning much larger scale roll outs as part of their 2025 strategy. All of this will require the tracking and monitoring of AI influenced business value.

These objectives need to be part of this theme:

• Maximizing everyday productivity with AI tooling
• Enabling employees to create and delegate to simple AI agents
• Low-code and AI based automation of business processes
• Measuring the business impact of the adoption
• Securing the estate and applying governance

Ask yourself the question... at the end of the year, can I say that I've enabled every employee to be their best? In some cases the answer to that question doesn't relate to technology at all, but if your employees are suddenly the organization that is doing manual spell-check vs. using autocorrect, you have a problem. Similarly is the story of those employees not using AI tools to accelerate their everyday work. The laggards will claim, "they haven't found the right use case yet", but those who have a growth mindset and empower their employees with the same will see the clear change in behavior.

For this topic I recommend following these individuals in the new year:

Abram Jackson Jared Spataro Todd McLees Jack Rowbotham Charles Lamanna

Theme 2: Prioritize Innovation with Real Impact

The most successful innovation projects in the last year have been those that had a positive and measurable impact on revenue or critical impact to the mission of the business. I don't see that changing in 2025. In fact, it will accelerate as companies start to get back on their feet and look at ways to take advantage of some momentum. This might be by accelerating the salesperson, enabling a more seamless transaction experience, or building new revenue generating products. This doesn't mean the scenarios are easy or just tactical. These solutions come about because companies are truly looking at the possible future and building backward from there to what they can accomplish.

Does this mean that we have a dry solution-to-business-value payoff process in everything we do? No, in many cases the steps to get to the goal may have very little immediate impact financially but build toward a solution that they make possible. This is where the word "innovation" comes in... which is around experimentation-with-purpose. Too many companies don't have an intentional culture of experimentation. I say the word "intentional" because few of us are truly research organizations, but most of us need to experiment and use the scientific method more to determine the steps between A and B, as well as what A and B are.

A few examples of this in-practice are:

• Early identification of possible futures
• Enablement of innovation and experimentation
• Scientific method of understanding progress
• Building blocks to get to success
• Measurement of value in practice
• Early and regular ability to get feedback that matters
• Ethical and governance framework for AI

You will see organizations next year, like you see every year, that will innovate in a way that you don't expect. You will also see organizations next year, like you see every year, that were historically very strong in their space but failed to lead a changing market. The hallmark of this is the term Disruptive Innovation, or the creation of an idea that engages a need in the market in a way that is both simpler and more direct than was imagined before.

For this topic, I recommend following these individuals in the new year:

J.D. Meier Brian Evergreen and the late Clayton Christensen.

Theme 3: Optimize IT Operations

Driving optimization in IT was already a theme from 2024 due to the general economic environment, but I don't see this stopping in 2025. The main question is to drive IT operations into a commodity, not with offshore, but with more efficient technology. How can we take our activities we perform and build architecture or automation that consistently drives down what it takes to maintain by mitigating tech debt and maximizing 1-touch systems.

A few examples of this in contrast are:

• End user computing that leverages cloud-identity, cloud management, and autopilot
• Cloud infrastructure FinOps practices to drive down spend
• PaaS and SaaS replacement of legacy technologies
• Cloud-based collaboration, archive the file servers
• Identify the top 10 internal processes to automate
• SaaS-based data platforms like Fabric over IaaS or even PaaS based tech

The best way to determine things like this is to "clean the basement" and truly perform a "five r's" analysis in order to determine your optimal destination. This is one of the main reasons I'm in favor of lift-and-shift... because as part of that you have the opportunity to analyze every migrated workload and perform a critical analysis of what you can shut down. The migration to the cloud is not just about getting out of the datacenter. It's about changing the operational model, refactoring the team, preparing for the future, and shutting-stuff-off.

For this topic, I recommend following these individuals in the new year:

Jeremy Winter Scott Guthrie Brendan Burns Alex Simons

Theme 4: Position Data for the Mission of Your Business

The "your data needs to be ready for AI" conversation has been part of the discourse for a while. I don't disagree, but the bigger picture is the inherent WHY. There will be less and less tolerance to meaningless data initiatives and much more focus on data that serves the needs of the business and especially the customers of the business. Is your data just used for internal purposes, or is it used to create value for your customers. This is the track that companies will continue to move toward.

What might this look like:

• Map the true needs of your customers (not just the product you deliver)
• Understand your pipeline to deliver value to them
• Provide a picture of internal optimization of that value stream
• Be able to share that same picture with them
• Think past the current value and look to how you improve their business
• Map your data capabilities to that value

For example, let's say that your organization ships products at low margin to hundreds of companies. Imagine your profitability is based on how much you can eek out that last .005% of every product you sell. In order to gain stronger partnership you might build data to use internally that expresses how you can best align to their needs. That is step 1 of attacking this problem. However, imagine if that data were for the customer's consumption. You might then transparently create a much stronger partnership that maximize both firms. Now, imagine all that your company knows about the aggregate companies it works with. Imagine if you could use that information to drive best practices in their organizations. You might even upcharge a service based on creating that value. This... is where companies that win will be orienting themselves in the upcoming years.

A few more foundational moves I'm seeing:

• Fabric and Databricks have a lot of momentum. If you are building elsewhere, check these out.
• Tableau is dead. Don't build on it if you are trying to avoid tech debt
• Medalion architecture, lineage, and certified dataset are important

For this topic, I recommend following these individuals in the new year:

Arun Ulag Jeff Winter

Theme 5: Architecture is Critical to Security

The final topic, but not the last in priority is addressing security gaps. I wish I could say, "they will learn because of all the issues we saw this year", but I'm not sure they will. There will be money spent on security. There will be a LOT of money spent on security. That said, will it be spent on architecturally addressing security issues, or will it be spent on adding another tool to the toolchest? Fundamentally improving security is more about addressing architectural gaps and less about just adding a tool. Simplification here also has a lot to do with this.

This year, most of the security issues were caused by these:

• Lack of network segmentation
• Weak network access control
• Identity without MFA or conditional access
• Poor patching practices
• Weak end user computing security
• Lack of modernization to cloud based systems
• Missing change management
• Vendor management gaps

Do these look like "add another tool to the mix" problems to you? Generally not. In many cases they are more about simplifying, modernizing, and ditching 10 tools for 1 simpler solution. For instance, a company that images, secures, and manages the mailing of a prepared PC could easily replace that complicated process with shipping a bare-metal PC and autopiloting it once it gets to the user.

For this topic, I recommend following these individuals in the new year:

Mark Simos John Savill

So, more in the new year and more themes to go. If you want to hear more about these themes, as well as 5 - 10, join my session in January!

Nathan Lasnoski