While the future is uncertain, technology leaders must still identify and commit to strategic outcomes and initiatives. The immediate focus areas might differ depending on the organization’s size and stage. Goals are usually to save costs, improve margins, grow, or pivot to a reinvented business model. Technology is vital to achieving these goals. Based on Gartner’s 2023 top tech trends following are the critical actionable initiatives:
- Optimizing IT Systems for Greater Reliability
- Accelerating Vertical Offerings
- Enabling Greater Connectivity
- Pioneering Business Model Change
- Reinventing Engagement with Employees & Customers
A key trend of this year’s list is how forward-thinking companies leverage software platform engineering to optimize developer experience and accelerate digital delivery. The engineering technology trend is not an exercise in retooling. Instead, it is about challenging every assumption, designing for better outcomes, and, ultimately, creating an alternate IT delivery model for the future. Engineering technology scenarios include operating models, automation, architecture, technology debt, platform enhancement, and infrastructure.
To succeed in engineering efforts, tech leaders should have process-focused engineering while adopting new technologies, outsourcing, and offshoring.
The key focus areas for engineering include automation, technical debt, and platform enhancements. There are automation opportunities throughout the IT life cycle. These include, among others, automated provisioning, testing, building, deployment, and operation of applications. The second area for engineering opportunities is to reduce technical debt. Technical debt does not happen because of poor code quality or shoddy design. Often it’s the result of decisions made over time—actions individually justified by their immediate ROI or the needs of a project. Organizations that regularly repay the technical debt by revising software as needed will likely be better positioned to support investments in innovation. Re-platforming applications to cloud can help offset these costs and accelerate speed-to-market and speed-to-service. Organizations that do not pay attention to technical debt regularly end up allocating most of their budgets to platfrom maintenance, leaving little for new opportunities. Platform engineering also includes continuously enhancing the platform with new features to support the new business models in new verticals and commoditizing new opportunities that can come by sharing or consuming external data and platform features.
Formulating a practical software engineering approach for your organization is critical for achieving the desired results. Organizations often partner with external vendors to achieve their objectives, but partnering with unreliable vendors can set you back and cost valuable time and money. When partnering with external software delivery vendors, ensure that software delivery is CTO-led and innovation-based and that the management is hyper-focused on quality, time, and cost.
The points mentioned above are high-level guidelines for holistically thinking about platform engineering; a more profound discussion and understanding of the company and the industry are needed to create the right approach. However, if you want a more detailed overview, please get in touch with me at rizwan.khan@fuzzitech.com.
As a CTO, I have years of experience in platform engineering, including non-profits, and I am always available for fruitful discussions to solve challenging problems.
