What would Marcus Aurelius say about IT Services in 2025?

There are many branches of philosophy, and I'm not an expert in any of them, but based on my rudimentary knowledge the Stoics had a good outlook that could be applied to the IT market which, again I wouldn't claim to be an extensive expert in like some, but I have absorbed some experience over the years.

So, without sounding too pompous, (too late some might say.....) I've chosen the following as an apt one around which to organise my thoughts - “Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.”

Well it's fair to say that the IT market is dynamic, we are in a continuous arms race to develop "the new" and replace "the old" aka legacy. We go through 3 hype-curves before breakfast and do three sprints over lunch. SO, what is likely to happen in 2025 and what could be a Stoic perspective on it?

Let's start with a key focus for 2025 of even-mindedness, which as Heraclitus is reported to have said is a great virtue. In the context of IT Services I see this as being between the constant drive for cost savings & efficiency and the need to deliver business outcomes and benefits. TCO reduction is still seen by analyst firm, ISG (Information Services Group) , as the key factor for IT decisions but that is closely followed by future technology roadmaps and business requirements alignment & outcome delivery. Taken together we can see that ensuring the balance between cost/efficiency and value is now more even which is a more stable dynamic. To maintain this I can forsee an increased impetus around the Enterprise-level implementation of new IT ways of working such as Agile, DevOps, etc with the inclusion of capabilities such as SRE, Observability and Quality Engineering.

So, whilst it's true we're looking to embrace the present in an even-minded way, if you've been in the IT market for a while you can think of all the changes you have seen and realise that the world is nothing but change. This year we've seen the latest spike in interest for "AI x.0" with GenAI. It's gone through a steep hype curve and come out with proven use cases (I'm a convert!!) that are now being rolled out. In 2025, I predict that it will become ubiquitous, delivering value, and people will wonder what all the fuss was about without realising it's part of their daily life.

I think the biggest trend in IT in 2025 will not be tech related, it will be in people's attitude how to drive change. Cloud transformation is now all encompassing - is it waning? Don't know. GenAI technologies are there to be used & hopefully not abused. Automation and Agentic AI are tools are at our disposal but how to we get those DNA-based lifeforms to exploit the latest tech.

Julius Caesar is supposed to have asked to be thrown to the wolves so that he would come back and lead the pack. Well, many of today's conflicting IT challenges can certainly turn around and bite you, or gobble up your time, but it will require resiliance, a clarity of thought & direction and a stoic attitude to change the IT services world in 2025 and extract the maximum value that all the latests technolgies and capabilities offer.

There's a lot more to discuss and since it is the human change that will drive value in 2025 maybe we should start with an Existentialist perspective......