Six topics that make up BT’s 2024 route

In the business world, information technologies (IT) units play a central role in digital transformation. Due to public cloud, everything-as-a-service (XaaS), artificial intelligence, and other advances, companies are constantly placing new demands on IT leaders and teams. Pointing out that IT can be the driving force behind the successful integration and implementation of technology to create innovative, flexible, sustainable, data-driven organizations, KPMG’s “Future of IT” 2024 report focuses mon six trends and explains how IT will shape the digital organizations of the future. Information is given mabout how it can be shaped. Gökhan Mataracı, KPMG Turkey Innovation and Technology Consultancy Leader, said, “The future of IT is exciting. IT leaders and their teams can help organizations transform into connected, strong and reliable institutions during the digitalization process. In this report, we highlight the main features of a future in which IT is at the center of this transformation. We have drawn the lines and highlighted the steps that need to be taken. Our expert friends at KPMG work together with IT teams to help their companies overcome the challenges they may face. As KPMG, we believe that this transformation in the business world offers opportunities that are too important to miss.”

The report underlines that IT leaders and their teams must master six basic priorities to make the dream future for companies a reality due to advances in technology, and these priorities are listed as follows:

XaaS and public cloud: According to the report, cloud/XaaS provides companies with benefits such as scaling up and down in a short time, benefiting from the most up-to-date and innovative solutions, and reducing upfront costs for implementing new solutions. Almost two-thirds (64%) of respondents to the KPMG Global Technology Report 2023 say they have increased their profitability or performance in digital transformation efforts thanks to public cloud and XaaS technologies. In the new world, public cloud providers, not IT, will drive the changing functionality of their solutions. At this point, IT also needs to integrate new applications with old solutions and adapt to shared security models.

Data and analytics: Survey results are also shared in the report, which points out that effective data management is now very important to create competitive advantage. Two-thirds of respondents to this survey say data and analytics improve their organization’s profitability or performance. Data will become even more important as companies explore the potential of artificial intelligence based on clean and reliable data. Thus, the share of spending on data and analytics in total IT spending is expected to increase significantly over the next three to five years. It is also noted that IT leaders will face increasing pressure to maximize the return on data budgets and innovate and manage data analytics with technologies such as artificial intelligence. Nearly half (46%) of technology leaders admit they are behind schedule on their data and analytics strategies.

Cyber attacks: According to the report, the increasing use of public cloud, XaaS technologies and smart products is accelerating the convergence of IT with operational technology systems. While this expands the area of cyber attacks, it also makes companies more vulnerable to these attacks. Because companies are now becoming more dependent on third parties. As technologies migrate to the public cloud, third parties will likely be responsible for resistance to attacks. However, in the eyes of enterprise leaders, the responsibility for resilience will remain with IT. Therefore, the report recommends that IT leaders continue to invest in security to protect profitability and performance from the damage of cybersecurity breaches.

Talent wars: The report predicts that the employer war for IT talent will intensify as the long-standing talent shortage in IT becomes apparent; it is noted that in 30 to 70% of data, security and development job postings, the desired candidate cannot be found. In fact, it is estimated that 8 million full-time software developers and cyber security experts will be needed worldwide by 2025. Therefore, it is recommended to add specialized architectural and data engineering skills to the list of requirements to succeed in the XaaS future. KPMG’s 2023 survey of technology leaders also identifies key talent shortage as the biggest challenge hindering successful digital transformation.

Innovation partner: BT demonstrated its importance with its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost overnight, IT helped companies reimagine how they reach customers and employees and optimize their supply chains. IT leaders enabled their companies to transform faster and achieve better results than the global average. They did this through greater innovation, higher employee productivity, and improved customer engagement. For this reason, business strategy has now become inseparable from technology strategy. This requires IT to remain a vital innovation partner helping business in a dynamic environment. Rising IT spending also puts pressure on IT as a business partner to do more, faster, better.

ESG’s support for the cloud: Today, ESG (environmental, social, governance) is important for organizations both immediately, such as cost savings, lower cost of capital, and longer-term, dynamic, such as market share growth, employee retention, and reducing regulatory and reputational risks. represents a source of value. This rise of ESG is driving investment in reporting tools and moving to the cloud. Therefore, the report underlines that to derive value from ESG, the entire organization, including IT, must operationalize ESG. It is noted that IT can contribute significantly to organizations’ emissions by managing the power consumption of data centers as well as the production and supply chains of hardware and end-user devices.