Making Predictions: Career Limiting or Career Imperative?
When people ask me about my thoughts about the future, I wear a serious expression and confidently provide random predictions. “Oh yes, we will colonize Mars by 2025” or “Most of our nutrition will come from algae”.
The world of IT bears more immediate responsibilities, having to make short-term decisions that will impact the datacenter for years to come. Can IT predict the optimal infrastructure solutions for the 3-5 year horizon? History has proven that we can’t meaningfully predict what's coming that far out.
What would be your cloud strategy and how many times have you changed it?
What would be your yearly data growth rate of compute and capacity and their trends?
What hardware will you be buying for storage, compute and network?
Which 5 vendors will be consuming most of your budget?
What organizational changes, mergers, or other disruptive events will your organization go through?
What new forms of data will be considered integral to your success?
or a career limiting move for an IT manager?
It’s critical that we consider about the plausible options for the future of our digital businesses. Just as it’s important to acknowledge the obstacles to modernizing long-lived tier 1 workloads, we also have to acknowledge that there will be completely unpredictable changes in technology and business strategy where IT will need to rapidly adapt, and this is where the rubber meets the road.
What are the full costs of change in terms of capital, learning curve, and lost opportunity due to lock in, data-gravity, and inertia of existing solutions? Are “easy” choices being made by your team that will become killers of flexibility down the road?
Agility principles drive everything we do at NooBaa, where we've developed the world’s next generation data-fabric. I won’t belabor the point - we’re happy to provide a deep dive for you - but we reject predictions, and instead embrace technology that gives you a fabric that can consume any capacity resources, located anywhere.