The Role of the IT Professional over the Next Decade

By 2025, we will be living and working in a world dependent upon the Internet of Everything, Virtual Reality, Mass Automation and Advanced Robotics. Our cars will be driving themselves, coordinating with each other autonomously on the roads to prevent collisions. Much of the Blue Collar jobs in the the First World service industries will be taken up by Drones. 

The Present

As of 2015, hotels and hospitals are already employing robots, both to cut costs and improve operational efficiencies. They are also doing so, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to match the new generation of job seekers much more informed, thanks to the advent of the internet, with higher aspirations than any generation before before, with jobs of menial or tedious natures. 

As of 2015, we are on the verge of an explosion of mass-marketed consumer VR products and the interconnection of everything through the internet, allowing every inanimate object in our daily lives to communicate, to serve our needs better. 

We are able to work across time-zones, in fact from across the world, remotely, through a laptop, with a WiFi connection, making the physical and fixed work station increasingly less relevant. We are on the verge of 4D interface enabled Telepresence Robots, that all you to virtually experience a far away physical space, while working remotely from the safety and comfort of home.

All this progress, as of 2015, is thanks to the hard work and successes over the last 2-3 decades, of the IT Professional.

The Past

The internet and it's advent to it's present state, is thanks to the IT Professional. The advent of e-Commerce and the m-Commerce and the socialising of commerce online with success for business models like Airbnb or Uber, is thanks to the IT Professional. That now robots can autonomously communicate with lifts (elevators in American English) in hotels and hospitals or with each other, is thanks to the IT Professional.

Without LinkedIn, much of the world's professional population with become suicidal today. That is how much the IT Professional has transformed work and commerce. Without Facebook, an entire generation, will not know how to live. That is how much the IT Professional has transformed the way we socialise, express ourselves and interact with the world around.

All this success, has come over the past 2-3 decades rendering our world unrecognisable from what it was in the 1980s, when the first millennials were being born. In reverse, a ten year old of today, cannot fathom how we lived without the laptop and the smartphone back in the 1980s.

The next two decades, the next one decade particularly, will by far overshadow any progress the human society has made in it's history, including that of the past three decades, because of the technological convergences and realisations that await, beginning next year. All thanks to, you guessed it, the IT Professional!

The Next Decade

The period from 2016 to 2025 will be about implementing what has been developed and made possible till now, in convergence, with that which already has been implement.

The internet will converge with robotics. Sensors, will converge will mobile applications. Applications will converge with wearable electronic devices. Wearable devices will converge with Virtual Reality.

Just as there are many types of Medical Practitioners (the Cardiologist, the Neurologist, the Orthopaedic, etc) and Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, Automotive, Aeronautics, etc), there many different types of IT Professionals with diverse functions ranging from security, to networking to software writing. Primarily though, over the past few decades, or rather, for as long as the IT Profession has formally been in existence right up to 2015, the role has primarily and predominantly been, to facilitate and bridge communication of information or data, from man, to machine, and then back to man. And that is exactly, what is about to change.

The next decade, is going to be predominantly and primarily, about machine to machine communication. Whether it is transmitting what a mall or hotel beacon (a sensor really) picks, to some processor, which then autonomously transmits a message to a smartphone application of a consumer or computer in a car, communicating its location to all the other computers, in all the other cars, around or near it, either via satellite or directly. 

Where in the past, it has been about supporting man's efforts to serve man, more efficiently, the next ten years, are about enabling machines supporting machines, to serve man. And it is about enabling machines, in combination.

A young Technopreneur in Singapore, at the start of 2015, gave me a picture, of customers walking into a cafe, ordering drinks with brownies through the the Smartwatch on the wrist, which are then delivered by autonomous quad-copters, without error. After half an hour, the customers receive messages on their Smart watches, offering them refills on their beverages, at discount rates and the drinks are promptly replaced by quad copters, upon accepting the offer, at their tables. And then the customers walk out, without heading to a cashier, or ever touching a wallet, because payment is automatically made, at time of ordering, through the app. Basically, a watch application, connects through the internet, to a software at the cafe, managing the orders and drinks, that manages the quad copters and the drinks or food dispensers, along with the bank, to create a seamless transactional service process. Instantaneous transfer of data in multiple directions, simultaneously, between different machines and programs, all interconnected, all integrated. Making that happen, is the role of the IT Professional, over the next decade.

Since the advent of civilian internet, progressing through cable connections to wireless Broadband WiFi, from home to home, people have access as such that news travels faster than press and media companies, of any kind, along with all kinds of other information, without limits. No borders apply.

When something is technologically feasible, word gets out almost instantly. With information comes expectations. As a result of the internet's advent, the human society has come to expect a lot more. For example, because we know that the Internet of Everything is possible, and we know what is possible with the Internet of Everything, we expect it to happen, and sooner rather than later, since we already know, that it is already possible. That expectation becomes an onus, or rather, has already become an onus, upon the IT Professional to meet.

Picture the automation of the process of an aerial drone recording 360 degree footage in part of the world, streaming it live to VR Headsets all around the world, in which users can walk through the images, simultaneously, with avatars. That is the consumer expectation of lifestyle to be expected over the next decade. And enabling that automation will be the role of the IT Professional.

A Smart home monitoring young children, with bots to ensure safety, and 3D-Printing custom toys, for those children at their fancy, all autonomously without the parents paying any attention while away is an expectation the IT Professional will have to meet, by enabling the transfer, processing and management of the data as necessary to allow for such automation.

All this may sound like tall order and much work. If that is the case, the IT Professional is a victim of his own success. You see, because the IT Professional has succeeded in getting us this far in terms of feasibility, he has brought upon himself, to stay relevant or to compete, by acting on those feasibilities to meet the expectations of the next decade.

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting include Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking, Scenario Planning and Organisational Future Proofing.