To understand how IT managers and leaders’ roles are being shaped in response to digital transformation, Pega carried out research of 750 key players
Pegasystems, an American company that develops software for customer relationship management, robotic process automation, and business process management, has released new findings suggesting that global IT functions are set to go through a dramatic transformation over the next five years.
Conducted by research firm iResearch, the global study surveyed IT leaders from 10 countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific on how IT will evolve over the coming five years and found that IT leaders’ confidence in their own departments is not very high.
More than half of all global senior IT decision-makers (51%) are uncertain that their IT teams can enact positive change over the next five years, with one in 10 (17%) having either no confidence or trust at all or holding significant doubts.
58% of respondents admitted they have wasted between US$1 million and US$10 million over the last five years on the wrong IT solutions. Just 12% reported that all their IT investments had paid off in the last five years. Despite this wasteful spending, almost a third (29%) also said IT risks being underfunded unless budgets, along with IT roles themselves, are decentralised and integrated into other departments.
What changes will be made to the IT function over the next five years?
According to the survey, the IT function is set to undergo a significant makeover, which will allow for better decision-making, wiser investments, and greater cross-departmental collaboration.
These future changes may include:
- Decentralisation: The study showed that digital transformation has allowed 68% of IT leaders to disperse responsibility to other functions and 54% to decentralise it by delegating work to others. Wiser investments in technologies will make it easier for people across the business to do tasks that would previously have fallen to IT. As a result, 66% of respondents expect that digital transformation will result in work that allows IT workers to be more creative, cooperate more with other departments, and spend less time on administrative tasks.
- Developing better leadership and ‘people’ skills: More than a third of survey respondents indicated that people skills will be increasingly important to them moving forward. 38% of respondents said that as collaborative, empowering technologies give them the freedom to expand their roles and responsibilities, leadership skills will be critical to them.
- The end of specialist IT managers: Respondents said that building and learning new skills will have the biggest impact on their careers, with 78% of senior managers and 76% of managers saying that ongoing, lifelong learning will have either a big or transformational impact on them.
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion will be critical: Nearly one in three (30%) said that in the next three to five years, diversity, equity, and inclusion will continue to gain importance.
- Increasing workloads: Despite the fact that technology will relieve them of a lot of the routine administrative work that they do today — meaning less recoding, redoing, and rearchitecting — 67% of respondents also believe that their workloads are set to significantly increase as IT becomes more an increasingly valued part of the business.
“In the next three to five years, the IT function will look, feel, and perform very differently to today,” said Don Schuerman, CTO, Pegasystems. “The accelerated pace of digital transformation has put IT leaders front and center. It’s also taught many within organisations the strategic value these teams can provide if they are given the tools and the opportunity to be creative, collaborative, and focus their efforts on the areas where they can best add value. All of this will lead to better decision-making, more diverse, skilled workforces, and a more open, united way of working that will help to crush complexity and deliver better outcomes.”