Season 3 Finale

Switched On with Paul Modderman and James Wood

Podcast Episode! Season 3 FINALE

This is it! The end of season 3! Lots of solid leads on the question “Why can’t IT keep up with the business?” — and probably most importantly, a concession that the question probably started off a bit loaded. I think we came to several points of agreement, led by our awesome guests.

Highlights

• Yeah. It’s a loaded question.
• It really comes down to how much the IT job has changed. There are a lot of conflicting requirements.
• IT kind of winds up supporting systems that were shoved onto them, versus fully owning them
• ‘Prioritization is key to the whole game’, well said Wade at TSI

• Create your own APIs and consume them in your app. Make them fundamental.
• IT’s role 5 years from now:
• James: more integration, more facilitating data; fusion teams. Still places for pro-code developers, even as landscape shifts.
• Paul: need to grow more solution architects. Need to have more understanding of the solutions that are needed, even if I can’t know everything about the minutiae of every black box.

Money Quotes

James

When you start talking about complex hybrid landscapes…a lot of middleware and legacy warehouse solutions are showing their age.

As long as I have that [integrations/interfaces], that’s like a safety net if the app doesn’t do what I need. There’s a lot of legacy systems that don’t have that.

Paul

IT has a little bit less time to develop real ownership mentality of the solutions they provide to the business.

Data is probably one of the key indicators of the whole mess these days. The value of data is greater and more challenging than it was before.

We have to participate in telling the whole story. Support and ongoing help — our whole industry will have to get better at that part of the equation.