Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

IT is in the middle of a monumental shift. From on-site hardware centric, to software defined and cloud based.  The knock-on effect is that the demands and requirements on IT professionals are also changing. Much of the “keeping IT up-and-running” that used to occupy their time is now taken for granted as technology and applications are effectively taken care of by cloud service providers. So where does this leave your IT team? How do they stay relevant?

Most companies keep some IT in-house and therefore, having people that understand the tech, and are able to hold your service providers accountable, still remains important. But these days, for IT to stay relevant, the people need to be much closer aligned to the business. The person that looks after your enterprise storage now spends their time making sure that business applications run fast rather than focusing on the disk itself.

Your IT Teams are going to spend less time running IT and more time managing applications and data, and in doing so they will begin to add a new type of value to your organisation. However it is down to the executive leadership to harness this value. The following three R’s give a high level process to truly maximise how you IT professionals can become instrumental in helping you reinvent your business.

• Refocus your IT Teams to make them feel they are in the line of business and not just supporting the business.
• Retrain your IT professionals on data driven technologies such as Hadoop, Data lakes, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and IoT.
• Rally your IT team to get creative and see how they could leverage the new technology they learn to change your business.

This mind-shift combined with steep technology learning curve sits at the core of every data driven transformation initiative. Just as businesses are worried they may become irrelevant, your technicians have the same concerns about their own skills. It makes for a great alignment.

Cloudera does more than just work with IT professionals to implement cutting edge big data tech. Together with partners we help with the evolution of technical teams. We see the most success when the executive leadership has a growth mindset with willingness to explore new and creative use cases with technology. Technical teams with new tools can implement projects that directly improve customer engagement as example.  They can now effect transformations to current business models and they can deliver visibility onto market predictions that executives never had access to before.

The key is not just to give these people the technology but empower and challenge them to be part of the creative process. Knowing what’s technically possible feeds imagination and creativity in a constructive way that can more quickly be turned into actionable insights or applications.

When you ask your IT Teams to engage with companies like Cloudera, the secret sauce is to make sure you don’t just encourage them to learn the technology, you challenge them to run wild with their ideas at the same time. Increase the chances that the next idea that transforms your industry comes from your team inside your company.

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