Do you remember what business looked like even a few short years ago? A lot has changed in a very short period of time. And with the current changes in technology, the future will also be changing at lightning speed. Scary? In some ways. But the shifts are coming whether we’re ready for them or not. Automation, cloud-based services, even artificial intelligence will all play a role in the way we get things done.

Routine tasks are no longer a part of our lives. We have the ability to transfer massive amounts of data and even many of our daily decisions to machines, meaning we can focus our time in other places. If you’re ready for it, the new world will be amazing.

Automation

You’ve probably experienced this in many areas of your business. Recent reports predict as much as 50 percent of the functions performed today could be automated using existing technology. Imagine what will happen as we continue to see the possibilities and reap the rewards.

The impact on IT will be widespread. As AI begins to take over and we automate most of the mundane tasks in IT, it will allow companies to dedicate more resources to moving business forward. That will accelerate the time it takes for innovating for the future.

Flexibility

It’s important to remember what machines and AI are good at. If you have a task that is narrow in focus, one that you can lay down in step-by-step format, one that is repeatable, it’s possible to release that to AI. That makes technical jobs, jobs that require you to think on the run, improvise throughout the process, ones that are unpredictable at best, those jobs are our future.

Tomorrow’s landscape will require people to think like never before. The best employees will be flexible and able to reason out complex problems. It’s about overcoming setbacks and being able to abandon ideas when they are no longer working out. Flexibility will be key.

While machines may be good at doing certain tasks, it will be people working alongside them to make them run better, more efficient, and give even more opportunity to the businesses that depend on them.

Collaboration

Remember when individual departments were set up in a business, each doing their own thing with little regard for the other departments? Sure, weekly meetings might have been necessary to steer this boats. But each department was uniquely their own.

We don’t see that as much anymore. A power shift is happening, and it requires everyone to work together towards the same end goal. That means IT functions are no longer in one department; every division has a piece of the pie.

Technology is no longer just a function that runs on the side. What happens in production impacts finance. Sales impacts the accounting department. And management on every level benefits from seeing how it all ties together. When roles are combined, and everyone sees how they fit into the jigsaw puzzle that makes up their enterprise, it runs smoother and more efficiently than ever.

Security

New technology will always introduce new problems. If there is one thing for sure, it’s that the security threat landscape will always be there, ever-growing, ever-changing. That requires experts to think on their feet, being able to identify holes as quickly as they happen, and finding the talent needed to thwart situations before they blow up.

While many IT departments in the past may have played reactor roles, they are quickly finding the landscape to be changing. Being caught shorthanded means putting a whole lot at risk; more than most business environments can handle. That means focus and talent have to come together and discover how best to move forward using whatever tools and resources they have on hand.

In all cases, businesses don’t have to go it alone. The C-suite teams that learn early on to rely on all they have available to them will succeed faster and move farther than ever before.

The only question now is: Will you be one of them?