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The future of work in technology:

 

1) Forces shaping the future of work in technology 

Technology's transition to a new role in the organization requires the work of technology to change. Three forces are converging to reshape the future of work in technology: 

The proliferation of disruptive technologies is continually reshaping businesses, industries, and markets. 

Technology's role is shifting to that of a catalyst for business strategy and transformation, changing the expectations and delivery of technology and blurring the lines between business and technology functions. 

Global demographic and workforce trends such as gig and contingent workers, a multigenerational workforce, more diverse talent, and global talent markets are transforming the labor market in general—and the technology workforce in particular. 

In the face of these drastic shifts, many savvy CIOs and other technology leaders are aiming to shape the future of work in technology. To do so, they can harness these forces and balance their competing demands while continuing to support operational excellence, meet business and customer expectations, and drive innovation, disruption, and digital transformation. 

 

2) Traditional IT disciplines evolve to modern technology disciplines: 

Many technology leaders recognize these shifts are happening but may not understand their fundamental implications on technology work and the workforce and workplaces needed to deliver it. As a result, some leaders have approached the evolution to the future of work with disjointed, ad hoc efforts. 

These changes have made the traditional scope of IT work unsustainable. Business leaders should redefine technology work beyond IT and refresh traditional IT disciplines to create technology  disciplines focusing on value creation (figure 1). In this report, we deliberately replaced the acronym "IT" with "technology" because the scope of responsibility is vastly different for each. IT refers to the historic technology organization and its inward-focused IT disciplines. In the future, technology work will spread throughout the enterprise and may not be directly controlled by the CIO. Business and technology leaders alike can receive help from becoming comfortable with the idea of looking at technology holistically across the organization. 

This evolution goes beyond semantics. Innovative technology disciplines are more than simply a unique way of operating. Collectively, they define a fundamentally new type of work that extends beyond the boundaries of the technology organization to business and functional areas (see sidebar, "New IT disciplines"). Ultimately, these new disciplines can help transform the technology work, workforce, and workplace. 

 

 

3) New IT disciplines: 

Business cocreation. Business cocreation is a shift in the role of the technology function from supporting character to costar. Together with business functions, technology teams can drive innovation and cocreate products, services, and experiences that drive growth, revenue, and competitive advantage. This likely will require unprecedented levels of collaboration among business and technology functions during the design, development, and deployment of products and services. 

Value realization and measurement. The future of work in technology likely requires traditional IT governance and performance metrics to evolve to focus on realizing and measuring value. Clearly articulated business goals can supply clarity on aims and metrics. KPIs such as revenue, market growth, and customer satisfaction can help check overall progress, keep business-technology alignment, and keep teams jointly accountable. 

Product management. When a product mindset is applied to the traditional IT disciplines of application and program management, technology work can be viewed as a product that solves business problems, rather than a project that implements an application and delivers functionality. This can ensure development of a coherent product strategy, a coordinated plan for spreading technology work across business and functional areas and external partners, and engagement with external stakeholders—including customers, prospects, and ecosystem partners—throughout the product development process. 

Experience and design. This modern technology discipline focuses on tasks such as embedding technology into the end-to-end customer life cycle to provide products and solutions throughout the customer journey and help ensure that critical bottlenecks are quickly identified and resolved. Analytics and AI can help predict user behavior and provide a differentiated experience, thereby enabling revenue growth: Revenues for companies whose customer experience is highly ranked outgrew other companies by more than five to one, suggesting that technology leaders should actively engage in customer experience and design to provide this edge. 

Technology architecture. Architectural discipline is often a casualty of rapid growth. Mergers and acquisitions, aging legacy systems and processes, and the proliferation of data and applications also can complicate and strain architecture, platform, and infrastructure management. Decisions about cloud adoption or off-the-shelf software purchases can be evaluated not only on cost, features, and functionality but also on their ability to offer future options, flexibility, agility, scalability, and speed to market. 

Data and insights. Customer data can increase engagement and helps the team create products and experiences to support individual customer journeys. Business data can improve decision-making, while product data can be monetized or used to help improve reliability and experience. Yet data on its own does not drive value—it first should be normalized, aggregated from across the organization and external sources, and analyzed to deliver insights that can be monetized. Few organizations have cracked the code for monetizing data, an even more challenging task because of the velocity at which data is being generated. 

Product delivery and operations. Continuous delivery can enable faster, more iterative delivery of technological work, with continuous attention to improving quality. This likely includes migrating to approaches such as Agile development and DevOps to deliver greater, faster business value. Because legacy environments often use a mix of delivery methods, many organizations that shift to these methods may employ a hybrid approach. 

Talent continuum. Talent of the future likely will be valued not only for technical skills but also for agility, flexibility, ability to collaborate, and other soft skills. To access needed skills, leaders may need to use talent from across the open talent continuum, which includes full-time and contract workers, crowdsourcing, and the external partner ecosystem. In addition, the talent continuum will include human-machine collaborations and partnerships. Businesses will rely on machines to carry out and augment work across a wide spectrum, where machines could serve as tools, assistants, peers, or even managers. 

Partner and ecosystem orchestration. Via engagement with the broader business ecosystem, leaders can tap new revenue sources such as business and industry platforms and digital marketplaces. Ecosystem partners can help organizations find and understand emerging technologies that may be relevant to business strategy and aims. Finally, engaging the ecosystem accelerates opportunities for learning, a largely social activity, and innovation, which is often the result of collaboration across fields of ability and domains of knowledge. 

Security, risk, and resilience. The historic IT risk, security, and compliance discipline typically is not designed to help companies evaluate, manage, and harness risks related to growth. Many savvy organizations are already managing such risks by using AI to protect against a rapidly changing threat landscape, managing risks to customer and company data and intellectual property used for value creation, bolstering organizational resilience to meet the requirements of a hyper-connected era, and owning digital responsibility and ethics. 

Product marketing is a vital part of this discipline: It includes market positioning, creation of customer personas, product launches, sales strategy development (for internal products, development of consumption strategy, among others). 

 

 

 4) Three interrelated dimensions: Work, workforce, workplace: 

These external forces and internal pressures fundamentally redefine the three dimensions of the future of work in technology: 

Every company's journey to the future of work will have a different starting point depending on business strategy, industry drivers, and market dynamics. However, regardless of entry point, businesses should first define new work and work outcomes before considering workforce or workplace transformations. 

Work (what): It's likely that technology work increasingly will be performed by humans, machines, or human-machine collaboration; leaders should decide how to deploy people, bots, and algorithms separately and in partnership. Technology teams' focus should turn from IT capabilities to work outcomes as they move from project- and process-centric operating models to those that prioritize products and outcomes. Concreating value with business functions and focusing on customer outcomes rather than processes are part of a more fundamentally human and meaningful work experience. As teams shift their emphasis to combined business-technology strategies and aims and are enabled by automation to trade manual and repetitive tasks for those requiring higher-order skills, it's likely that they'll find more meaning in their work. 

Workforce (who): Jobs and roles, talent and skills, and organizational structure will evolve. Employment models are already changing; businesses can access talent via a range of on- and off-balance sheet solutions. And finally, instead of being specialized technologists, technology workers can become collaborative cocreators of business value. 

Workplace (where): Technology workplaces are evolving from location-centric to relationship-oriented. The geographic location of the work will vary, and workspaces should be redesigned to maximize collaboration, productivity, and cocreation. When extended to a network of geographic locations, including virtual offices, coworking spaces, and traditional office spaces, seamlessly integrated technologies such as collaboration and digital reality tools can help ease and support connections among humans and machines. 

 

 

 

5) Work: From IT capabilities to technology work outcomes: 

Historically, technology teams took pride in developing and delivering IT capabilities to serve business needs. Technology leaders assessed and developed people, processes, and technologies to address organizational demands with complex capability models and frameworks—all within a centralized IT organization. 

As organizations develop joint business-technology strategies and collaborate to cocreate business value, processes and roles may change, causing skills and tasks to overlap across traditional business and technology borders. Integrating business and technology skills and teams likely will require CIOs and other functional leaders to rethink how they and their teams' work. The focus is no longer on the delivery of a project but on the value delivered from the outcome. "Redefining work means identifying and addressing unseen problems and opportunities in the work, for everyone at all levels and at all times," says John Hagel, cochairman for Deloitte LLP's Center for the Edge. 

The transition from IT capabilities to technology work outcomes requires a fundamental shift in thinking: Technology is not solely the purview of the IT function. Business leaders are equally accountable for the successful design and delivery of technological work. 

The two-step process of reimagining what technology work will look like in the future includes first deconstructing the work and identifying work outcomes, and then defining the roles that support new disciplines. 

Step 1. Deconstruct the work and identify work outcomes 

To gain clarity on the new work and provide guidance to those in new roles, technology leaders can deconstruct the work into work outcomes for each discipline. These outcomes will define not only the new work, but also the expected outcomes and accountabilities. 

Further analysis of work outcomes can help determine which activities an organization should continue, discontinue, or deliver in a different way based on the changing role of technology. It can also help executives identify the work that will be performed by humans, machines, or a combination of the two—and help ensure that work is meaningful to all stakeholders. 

This level of detail can help provide a deeper understanding of how work is changing and show how the roles and the organization could evolve to deliver the work. For example, a more in-depth examination reveals how the work outcomes for the technology disciplines of product management and product delivery and operations could be defined. 

Step 2. Identify roles that support new disciplines 

Once work outcomes have been designed, leaders can establish the organization and roles needed to support the new disciplines and outcomes. New roles will emerge but others, such as project manager and business analyst, may evolve, decline in demand, or even disappear. Some roles, such as product owner, may be filled by workers in business functions rather than those in the technology function. 

Leaders can identify roles that do not transfer to the new model and determine how resources can be reskilled, trained, and supported to make the shift. The vast majority (89 percent) of surveyed technology executives plan to somewhat or very extensively retrain current staff, but not all employees will want or be able to transition roles for example, some project managers may not be able to become scrum masters. Defining clear work outcomes and accountabilities can allow leaders to have candid conversations with technology and business staff about future expectations. 

Clarity of roles and organization structure to support the new disciplines can help leaders make a smooth transition. For example, the average technology organization might have hundreds of project managers and application developers. Executives can understand, assess, and communicate the new skills and tools these roles will need, and identify individual road maps based on current competencies, future potential, and passion. 

 

 

 

 6) Workforce: From specialized technologist to collaborative cocreator: 

The workforce required to deliver these new work outcomes could be a gating factor in this transition. As technology work evolves, talent with the required skills and capabilities is increasingly in high demand. The size, scope, and competencies of the workforce required to deliver the new technology work likely will be very different than in the past. 

Some leaders begin considering workforce transformation without first determining the work and work outcomes that should be delivered. However, the lack of clearly identified and articulated work outcomes can lead to piecemeal, inefficient, and unproductive efforts. It bears repeating that business and technology leaders should first define new work outcomes—only then can they make determinations about transforming the workforce. The following considerations may help. 

Technology athletes replace specialized technologists 

As technology works, so do the skills and proficiencies required to complete the work. Fifty-one percent of CIOs surveyed in Deloitte's 2019 report on Industry 4.0 readiness cite a significant mismatch between current skill sets and future needs. 

In the past, many IT workers have been task-focused, often with highly specific skill sets. A worker with sought-after application development skills could spend his or her entire career within a single specialization. Technical expertise remains critical and in short supply—65 percent of global CIO survey participants say analytics and data science will be the hardest-to-find technical skills in the next five years while 54 percent named cyber, and 49 percent named emerging technologies. 

However, some specialized skill sets are falling by the wayside as IT becomes more automated. "Twenty years ago, people branded themselves as SAP experts and even focused on a specific module, and that was going to be the focus of their entire IT career," says Wayne Shurts, former EVP and CTO, Sysco Corporation. "Those days are gone. Today it's about technology athletes—people who are curious and are always looking to solve business problems through technology." 

Ditto, says Rachel Parent, MassMutual CIO. "It's no longer imperative that the IT leader be deeply skilled in a specific technology discipline. Technology is changing too rapidly for that depth of expertise to remain relevant," she says. "There's incredible value in having skills that allow you to keep current with technology trends. Understand which of those can help drive your organization's strategy relative to serving customers, enabling collaboration, and increasing operational and financial efficiencies." 

Machines augment tech workers 

With clearly articulated work outcomes, technology leaders should be able to align roles and work. They can ascertain the outcomes that can best be achieved by machines, humans (permanent employees, contractors, or otherwise sourced), or a combination of both. 

"It's important to think about how people and machines should work together," says Dell CHRO Steve Price. "This will have implications for how and where work gets done, the kind of skills people need to possess, and the broader expectations of the future workforce." 

While cognitive technologies are indeed transformational, evidence suggests they will augment rather than replace workers. Most tactical, algorithmic, and structured work will be automated by machines over time, leaving much creative and strategic work for human talent. "We have spent way too much time thinking about people versus computers, and not nearly enough time thinking about people and computers," says Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. "We've spent too much time thinking about what jobs computers are going to take away from people, and not nearly enough time thinking about what people and computers can do together that could never be done before." 

Enduring human skills complement technical expertise 

In the past, soft skills that support collaboration and communication typically took a back seat to specialized technical skills. Today, soft skills are having a breakout moment. These enduring, essentially human skills are increasing in value in part because they cannot be replicated by machines. 

Even though future technology jobs may be more machine-powered and data-driven, talent likely will need to have more breadth across both business and technology areas. This could include critical traits for driving innovation and disruption, such as: 

Business and financial acumen to understand complex business challenges and decisions 

Ability to understand the engagement, interaction, and collaboration of humans and machines 

Enduring and essential human skills such as empathy, creativity, and enthusiasm for learning 

Ability to embrace change and uncertainty 

 

 

7) Workplace: From location-centric to relationship-oriented: 

The evolution of the work and workforce should be supported by targeted location strategies, as well as flexible physical and virtual workplaces. Fixed, uncompromising workplaces may need to evolve to virtual workplaces that leverage advanced mobility and connectivity, collaboration tools, and emerging technologies such as virtual and augmented reality that help improve collaboration and integrate workers from all segments of the open talent continuum. 

"When it comes to the workplace of the future, physical proximity is going to matter less and less," says Stella Ward, chief digital officer of Canterbury and West Coast District Health Boards, New Zealand. "There are so many collaboration tools out there to help teams get work done remotely. The challenge is identifying the right tools and making sure our employees know how to use them to maximize efficiency." 

However, that doesn't always mean face-to-face connections or the offices that host them are unneeded, although they may be designed differently. In fact, technology and business teams may require closer physical proximity than in the past. "Working in the office is about building relationships and trust between team members. When team members feel connected and trust each other, productivity increases," says MassMutual's Parent. "Good collaboration tools will help sustain this productive collaboration for longer periods of time when people cannot be regularly collocated but teams will still need to physically come together periodically. 

 

 

 

 8) Three key implications for the future of work transformation: 

Financial planning. Changes in technology—and corresponding changes in the work, workforce, and workplace—may have significant financial implications that should be understood early in the process. Engage necessary stakeholders to gain consensus on issues such as capitalization versus the expense model, as well as internal versus external spending. 

Ecosystem orchestration. The current procurement mindset often benefits the lowest cost provider, leads to transactional relationships, and binds the organization to multiyear commitments. And as the shelf life of skills moves from a lifetime to a few years, organizations cannot always rely on captive talent to do their work. Leaders are quickly realizing they should reimagine their ecosystems as sources of value cocreation, revenue, and augmentation of internal talent and skills. Businesses are evolving from members of a linear value chain that adds incremental value to participants in a much broader ecosystem of technology disrupters, incubators, startups, business partners, suppliers, and customers that cocreates business solutions, uncovers new opportunities, and delivers competitive advantage. One large distribution company built a platform that allowed real-time information to its suppliers and an integrated portal for its global distribution network that created efficiencies, reduced inventories, and increased profits across the entire ecosystem. 

Technology works in business. The pervasiveness of technology is impacting work outside of the traditional boundaries of IT. What might once have been viewed as a traditional business role is now becoming very tech centric. The impact of the changes in technology work, workforce, and workplace on business roles should also be considered. 

 

 

 

 

9) Lessons from leaders: 

The executives we interviewed provided three overarching lessons to help enable the Imagine-Compose-Activate process. 

Zoom out first. Technology leaders are problem-solvers who tend to "zoom in" on problems with the intent of quickly solving them. Instead of narrowing in on and trying to resolve specific pain points related to the future of work, consider first looking at the big picture, holistically taking into account changes in work, workforce, and workplace. "Zooming out" three to five years and envisioning a future without bounds can help leaders imagine and define the art of the possible without the current constraints. This could help leaders get "unstuck" from the present and drive a transformative mindset that could clarify the unrealized potential of work, workforce, and workplace. 

Access, curate, and engage talent. The traditional talent management mindset focused on attracting, developing, and retaining needed talent. The evolution of work, workforce, and workplace suggests the Attract-Develop-Retain model may have run its course. Consider instead the Access-Curate-Engage approach, in which organizations access talent on the open continuum, curate consumer-grade learning experiences that can enable technology athletes to build skills in real time, and engage talent by realigning rewards, incentives, and leadership to support and enable idea generation, cocreation, collaboration, accountability, and transparency. 

Iterate, deliver, and repeat. We can't emphasize this enough: The future of work transformation is a journey, not a destination. Continually iterate the work, workforce, and workplace models to account for changing business and technology landscapes. As new technologies and business models emerge, the work of technology will continually change and leaders in technology organizations likely will need to adapt quickly. 

 

 

10) Additional key recommendations: 

Shifts matter: Move from IT capabilities to work outcomes. Technology work has often been traditionally performed by a centralized IT function and "thrown over the wall" to the business to confirm whether promised results were achieved. To kick-start a business mindset change, we purposefully have moved away from the traditional notion of IT capabilities in this report and embraced the term "work outcomes." The concept of work outcomes holds both technology and business resources accountable for product outcomes as well as adjustments and iterations that allow for continuous business value. 

Bias toward speed and progress, not perfection. Recognize that speed and time to market are often key to competitiveness and cocreation. Releasing and iterating a minimally viable product based on customer feedback is fast becoming the norm. The technology work of the future is more akin to building speed boats than large naval vessels. Reliability, security, and resilience are still required, but flexibility, agility, and speed typically are more important. 

Embrace cocreation at the team, enterprise, and ecosystem levels. The future of work is not a solo journey. Partner with other executive leaders and business and functional executives and equip them with the knowledge and ability to make informed technology decisions. The global CIO survey found that technology leaders who elevate the tech fluency of business counterparts are likely to have deeper and more influential relationships with their peers. The three most important allies for technology leaders on this journey likely will be the finance, HR, and procurement leaders—help them become equally invested and accountable for the outcomes. 

Iterate with end the outcomes in mind. This journey may be triggered by business reorganization, skills shortage, business realignment, office space redesign, or many other potential causes. Irrespective of its entry point, a business should define work outcomes before trying to transform the workforce or workplace. Jumping ahead to reskilling the workforce or redesigning the workplace without understanding the shift in technology work could create chaos and confusion. After establishing work outcomes, leaders can determine the tools, automation, workforce needs, and how to augment humans with machines. Work outcomes and workforce decisions together can help determine the type of physical workspace, collaboration tools, and culture needed to support the change. 

Enable real-time learning. Gone are the days when professionals crafted and perfected their skills over decades, even lifetimes. An average employee may have multiple careers in an organization. To engage and retain high performers, leaders should develop continuous learning programs that provide real-time skills acquisition, on-the-job training, and experience-based rapid knowledge transfer. 

Stay informed through tech sensing. The increasing speed of technology change can make it difficult to stay abreast of advances. Technology leaders can keep informed of emerging technology trends and their business implications. Many leverage partner ecosystems to tap into new technologies, while others collaborate with universities and incubation hubs or invest in startups. Knowledge acquired as the result of such "tech sensing" approaches should be disseminated throughout the organization to help increase technology fluency. 

Align with purpose. External corporate brand, internal culture, and the technology organization's mission should align to a higher purpose. Top talent often wants to work for companies whose ambition, passion, and purpose rise above economic considerations. They're seeking organizations that believe in and significantly contribute to meaningful causes. Authentically aligning the organization to environmental issues, human development, public health, or other relevant causes that can help bring meaning to work can directly impact talent recruitment. 

Tolerate calculated risk. Typically, technology leaders avoid or minimize risk while business leaders seek to maximize value while taking calculated risks—two perspectives that are often at odds. Leaders shaping the future of work in technology can devise ways to consistently understand and agree on risk appetite with key stakeholders and make decisions and course corrections accordingly. Embrace ambiguity, uncertainty, and experimentation and avoid making risky decisions on behalf of the business. Instead, collaborate to make more informed, data-driven decisions. 

Think big to create an audacious future. Focusing on the big picture, rather than a single tool or solution, can help leaders take the first steps toward creating the future of work. Foundational change takes time and persistent work across multiple dimensions. Simply reskilling staff, bringing on a new leadership team, or automating existing work likely will not alleviate current challenges. Instead, a holistic plan that employs multiple work, workforce, and workplace strategies has a higher likelihood of success. 

 

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