The world is entering its fourth Industrial Revolution, commonly referred to as Industry 4.0. While Western economies ruled the first three industrial revolutions (steam, electrification, automation), the economies that will dominate a 4.0 World are unknown. The future is up for grabs.
The last few years have triggered dramatic changes in the way IT outsourcing arrangements have been made by enterprises. As expected, some of the changes are taking time before they become center stage. In addition, some of the triggers did not live past their hype and fizzled out before they could deliver the promised value sought by enterprises.
When a function or even a full department is outsourced to a managed service provider (MSP), the scope of work, requirements and service needs can at times be hard to nail down, especially as the relationship with the MSP evolves over time and the needs of the business evolve. This is particularly true in the case of IT Managed Services – an area with frequent need for outsourcing due to resource constraints and/or technical expertise and an area where it is critical that services continue uninterrupted.
Two years ago, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published its Future of Jobs report – exploring employment, skills and workforces in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This sparked debate – and growing concern – around a changing global employment landscape as the result of disruptive technologies, studded with widening skill gaps, new jobs and job displacement.
Using a diverse set of intelligent automation tools together to achieve your business aims isn’t always easy. More often than not, it involves figuring out how to integrate these different tools in what can become a very complex IT project.
Maybe Daniel Decatur Emmett will forgive me for “borrowing” some lyrics from his iconic 1850s American folk song, ‘Dixie’. I do this to encourage British business to look further afield for IT outsourcing services, as encouraged by Brexit. The USA and its domestic or onshoring companies represent a great but seldom considered alternative.
Robotic process automation is based on a new type of software. But will it result in a new type of outsourcer? James Hall, Founder and CEO of Genfour, thinks so. Welcome to the world of the virtual outsourcer.
Last week I had the great and highly enjoyable privilege of hosting a webinar given by Jeff Seabloom, Alsbridge’s Chief Revenue Officer, entitled ‘A 360-Degree View of IT: Six Key Questions’.
There is a fiction that suggests that business decisions are made on purely utilitarian grounds. Psychologists have shown convincingly that people value the avoidance of loss far more highly than capturing gains. There are many and significant implications for those seeking to implement change, particularly in an agile environment.
The Agile Manifesto
The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has discovered that a third of organisations find moving to cloud services a very difficult process. The study of 250 UK private and public sector senior IT and business decision-makers discovered that the step change to the cloud had been much more complicated than originally anticipated. The shift to could often involves changes in business process in order to succeed and hit the optimum levels of efficiency gains.
