Gartner has highlighted the six trends that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must start preparing for in the next 12-18 months.
“I&O leaders need to drive change, not simply absorb it,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, Research Vice President at Gartner. “They are expected to deliver more adaptable and resilient service from anywhere — and for an increasingly distributed workforce. This is pressuring I&O to take actions that will tie their decisions more closely to business requirements, a theme that runs through this year’s trends.”
Here are the top trends impacting I&O in 2022:
Trend No. 1: Just-In-Time Infrastructure
The speed at which infrastructure can be deployed is becoming just as important as putting the right infrastructure in the right place – colocation, data center, at the edge and more. This is the idea behind just-in-time infrastructure.
Borrowed from the term ‘just-in-time manufacturing,” this trend aims to reduce infrastructure deployment times as well as fuel enterprise responsiveness to business needs and anywhere operations.
Trend No. 2: Digital Natives
Digital-native companies are those that made public cloud and other digital capabilities part of their business model from the start, such as ride sharing applications or digital food delivery services. They combine different revenue approaches to monetize digital assets to gain new customers and boost market share and have only become more commonplace since the onset of the pandemic.
By 2025, 70% of I&O leaders who ignore innovation will be marginalized to legacy system support only.
Trend No. 3: Management Confluence
This trend reflects the need for the growing number of management and monitoring tools – from IT service management (ITSM) to artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) and more – to be brought together in a single, comprehensive tool.
According to the 2022 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey, 58% of high-composability enterprises build out integration capabilities for data, analytics and applications.
Trend No. 4: Data Proliferation
Data will continue to multiply in variety, velocity and volume. As businesses continue to expand their data collection and holding efforts, I&O will be instrumental in guiding the policies surrounding processing, retention and legal requirements of the enterprise’s data.
Trend No. 5: Business Acumen
I&O leaders are guiding their functions through a rapidly changing and distributed technology environment, which is threatened by the IT talent gap and requires new skills. According to a recent Gartner survey, 64% of I&O leaders point to insufficient skills and resources as one of their greatest challenges this past year.
Gartner expects that by 2025, CIOs will fill 65% of open I&O leader positions with people that have no I&O experience.
Trend No. 6: Career Ladders to Career Lattices
Similar to the business acumen trend, I&O is moving away from single domain career paths driven by workloads and legacy technical skills. In fact, 29% of the skills in an average I&O job posting in 2018 will not be needed by 2022, according to Gartner Talent Neuron data.
