Gartner: Software 2020: Rearchitecting for the Digital World

I've completed reading Gartner 2020 Rearchitecting for the Digital World article, below are some highlights from the report annotated with my comments as needed. I would still recommend you to read the report in full.

By 2017, 50% of total IT spending will take place outside the formal IT organization.

This is really interesting, the times where tradition do-it-all-in-one-place IT seems to be gone, organizations have to accept that some IT will not be centralized and distributed innovation became the new norm.

technology strategy can't simply be derived from the business strategy — it has to be part of the business strategy.

I can't agree more, IT role has been shifted from the classical view of being an "enabler" to become a "driver".

design for serendipity, rather than designing based on fixed requirements and existing architectures. This requires jettisoning many old and familiar methods and technologies.

Welcome to the new norm in IT, the pace of change in the digital world mandates designing and architecting applications that are adaptive, evolutionary and responsive to change.

The days of the single vendor, on-premises software suite are gone; hybrid implementations (specifically cloud and on-premises) are becoming the norm. 

Digital business requires more speed and agility, which means you need a remixed portfolio of providers. Adaptive sourcing is about shorter-term contracts, experimental relationships with vendors, and "techquisitions."

I guess this one would be the most painful step during the journey of digital transformation. I've seen many organizations that spent millions on building platforms and applications around single vendor and subsequently, the skill sets of the teams maintaining these platforms are also locked down to that vendor skill sets. the transition to a multi-vendor platforms will require new investments not only on the platforms and applications but also on repositioning these teams' skill sets.

things are changing too fast for a command-and-control style of management to be effective. Governance will be based on leaders setting goals and guardrails, and enabling teams to make and execute detailed decisions in a distributed fashion.

This is more of a culture change in my view which is required to embrace the agile world, Organisations still have old school, classic managers who are chasing developers every morning with a Microsoft Project Plan and spend hours and hours in tracking or in organising unnecessary meetings to iterate over and over again on the same thing aiming at perfecting it rather getting things done and focusing more on delivering real value to their customers. This style of management has to change and become more into inspiring management rather than controlling management.

Technology investments outside of IT are often referred to as "shadow IT" — as though it is something to avoid, or even fight. But these technology investments are a reality now that digital business lines are becoming profit-and-loss centers and are demanding more direct control over their development resources. 

IT leaders need to shift the mindset from shadow IT to citizen innovation, embrace the consumerization of software, and respond to the changing vendor landscape.

IT organizations need to reframe their perspective on "shadow IT," engage with it and adopt practices that will exploit it as a delivery mechanism, albeit with some guardrails and clarification of accountability to mitigate the risks and enhance the value.

I have to say that it was surprising to me when I read these points the first time, throughout all the articles and readings I have seen before (from Gartner and others) on shadow IT, the directive on Shadow IT was always towards "get rid of it", "control it", "govern it", "minimize it", etc., now there is a new directive which is to be more pragmatic and consider it something that actually could be very useful to drive innovations however with necessary steps towards risk mitigation.

In this age of distributed innovation, new competencies are emerging and evolving from traditional roles. Specifically, people that traditionally had a tight domain of control have to readjust to unknown outcomes. Enterprise architects become storytellers and influencers; business architects become anthropologists; integrators and taxonomists work more in real time, like jazz musicians, responding to unanticipated changes as they happen; project and product managers serve as conductors, creatively connecting the various pieces to achieve results. In this era, control gives way to influence and planning cedes to improvisation.

Another stress on people roles, most importantly in my view the last one where influencing people takes precedence over controlling them in the new ear of the digital world.