Did you set a New Year’s resolution? How is it going? We are currently embarking on a blog series of top goals for the construction industry in 2022 and beyond. Last week we focused on the worker. This week, let’s continue the conversation, focusing on how we can leverage technology to the fullest. In some cases, it means purchasing new solutions. In other cases, it means leveraging the tech tools that already exist within your “toolbox.”
At the end of last year, Gartner identified the top trends impacting infrastructure and operations for 2022. Let’s take a closer look at what you can expect in the coming year.
The first big tech trend to watch in 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. Gartner expects it to be a differentiating factor when enterprises compare and negotiate with service providers moving forward.
Another big trend is the rise of digital-native companies that made public cloud and other digital capabilities part of their business model from the start. 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.
Also, keep an eye on the move toward management confluence, which reflects the need for the growing number of management and monitoring tools to be brought together in a single, comprehensive tool. Such integration is indispensable in the adoption of composable technologies, one of the three domains of business composability, which allows components of systems and data to combine more quickly and easily.
Another trend is the ongoing data proliferation, which Gartner suggests will continue to multiple in variety, velocity, and volume. As businesses continue to expand their data collection and holding efforts, infrastructure and operations will be instrumental in guiding the policies surrounding processing, retention, and legal requirements of the enterprise’s data.
Business acumen will also rise, as 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 infrastructure and operations leaders point to insufficient skills and resources as one of their greatest challenges this past year.
Similar to business acumen, infrastructure and operations is moving away from single domain career paths driven by workloads and legacy technical skills. In fact, 29% of the skills in an average infrastructure and operations job posting in 2018 will not be needed by 2022, according to Gartner Talent Neuron data. Instead, infrastructure and operations teams are moving laterally across a competency-based lattice that takes into account softer skills and emphasizes both learning agility and cross-domain expertise.
Here’s the bottomline. Today’s construction companies need access to data. For some, this comes from leveraging the tools already in place to the fullest. For others, this means implementing new technologies. It all starts with creating a strategy around technology adoption—and then seeing it through. How will you leverage technology in 2022?
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