The nexus of forces - social, mobile, cloud and information - represents the coming of a change in IT infrastructure that will drive consumerisation in the industry. This is according to Gartner analyst and VP Andy Butler.
Butler says social, mobile, cloud and information are essentially four major trends that are forcibly changing behaviour and changing the way IT is implemented. "It forces us to change the IT infrastructure we have, whether we want to or not."
Social media is increasingly being used as part of business processes, cloud is bringing global-class delivery of services, and information is actively being sought, managed and moved around in the IT environment, he notes.
According to Butler, IT will increasingly be used to determine what is likely to happen (predictive analytics), as well as what has happened (dashboards) and what is happening (real-time analytics). "The nexus of forces make existing [IT] architectures, many IT strategies, organisational structures and the way IT works obsolete," he says. "IT requires a substantial overhaul, change and evolution to keep up."
Many IT strategies are limited by perceptions of what is possible based on what currently exists. "Existing architectures are usually conceived in isolation, and dependencies and integration are afterthoughts. [The architectures] are techno-centric rather than user-centric, and prescriptive rather than adaptive."
In addition, organisational structures are too command-and-control-oriented and hierarchy threatens to stifle innovation, he says. "The way IT works discourages citizen development; change management processes are too slow."
Butler explains that the nexus of forces brings several disruptions in IT architecture. "Social media has changed the rules of the game and the entire scenario of how we create and source content." Mobile has brought software and device and program requirements that have never been there before, he says. Big data has brought disruption in the form of market research, product and service development, advertising and analytical tools.
"The nexus means we must re-examine old assumptions. There is no single generic revolution of the IT infrastructure market. We've got to be open to go down a path of new infrastructure."
New roles and skills will emerge over the next three years due to the nexus of forces, he notes, such as behavioural practitioner (social), cloud engineer or architect (cloud), channels manager (mobile), and data scientist (information).
"There may be job losses and inevitably people will need to move into new job functions. Forget business alignment, think integration and immersion."
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