Published on the 07/10/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
The Internet of Things is eating IT budgets, with Gartner forecasting that next year CIOs will spend $US2.5 million a minute on IoT deployments…
The steep trajectory of demand means that in five years one million new internet commented devices will be deployed every hour. Welcome to the latest data deluge.
Not surprisingly, with that amount of data, CIOs have identified business intelligence and analytics as one of their top investment priorities for the coming 12 months.
These are just some of the startling insights coming out of this week’s Gartner Symposium in the US. The analyst will repeat the exercise in Australia later this month when it will run an Australian lens over the results of its 2016 surveys. At that time it will also reveal exactly how much of the global $US3.6 billion forecasted IT spend for 2016 will emerge from Australia and New Zealand, and whether these nations are keeping pace with the international rate of growth of 1.5 percent.
The top five spending priorities for the next year internationally are business intelligence and analytics, infrastructure and data centre, cloud, ERP and digitalisation/digital marketing.
The firm this week also revealed the headline findings of its survey of 2,900 international CIOs, 410 of whom are based in Asia Pacific. One of the key findings is that CIOs have adopted Gartner’s 2014 recommendations to establish a bimodal approach to systems development – which involves keeping legacy platforms operational, while also creating a fast and agile digital platform to support new business models and requirements.
Gartner said that 40 percent of all CIOs now had adopted the bimodal approach with the remaining cohort planning to follow suit in the next two to three years. This is fueling CIO expectations that digital revenues will grow from 16 percent to 37 percent of total revenues within five years.
Progress is even faster in the public sector where CIOs said that 44 percent of all processes were now digital, but they expected that to rise to 77 percent within five years.
However 65 percent of CIOs said that they were facing a talent crisis and challenged to find the skills needed to meet their change agendas.
One area which has long posed a skills problem is data science – and with the astonishing IoT forecasts from Gartner, that seems likely to be exacerbated.
According to Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s global head of Research, “Data is inherently dumb. It doesn’t actually do anything unless you know how to use it; how to act with it. Algorithms are where the real value lies. Algorithms define action. Dynamic algorithms are the core of new customer interactions.”
And humans write algorithms.
The race is on then to find and build this skills set. “The algorithmic economy will power the next great leap in machine-to-machine evolution in the Internet of Things,” said Sondergaard. “Products and services will be defined by the sophistication of their algorithms and services. Organisations will be valued, not just on their big data, but the algorithms that turn that data into actions, and ultimately impact customers.”
