Is ‘hybrid’ your new normal operating mode?

I resisted the temptation this year to do any 2021 technology predictions.  Although last year I was surprisingly accurate predicting that track and trace would be important.  I just failed to anticipate that we would need to use it for people and their social contacts!

COVID-19 has changed many things about the way we now want and need to operate.  Faced with the need to change fast we have come face to face with something we always knew to be true, that a company is only as adaptable as its core processes and infrastructure.  Many of us have had to come up to speed fast with this new operating reality by retrofitting resilience and adaptability into brittle processes.

At the same time, technology at every level continues to be a journey whether that is moving from 4 to 5G.  Or the impact of Moore’s law ticking away as we start to see the next generation of microprocessors emerge. Or, as we move from lifting and shifting home grown applications from on-premises to the cloud and re-building businesses processes in cloud native technology and services.

So, is the practise of following a target architecture and a multi-year change over programme(s) to get there still as relevant?  Should we be more ready to accept we will always be on a technology succession and adoption journey?  Is ‘hybrid’ the inevitable normal as opposed to be a problem to be solved with a project programme?  Is the trick to consider adopting tools and technologies that help us to manage a ‘hybrid’ state in such a way that it is better than the sum of its parts, without becoming a legacy?

There are many companies out there now developing technologies and ways of working to help us to be adaptive while also operating in a hybrid mode.  Cloud Gateway is a company that has worked to develop adaptive networking technology and ways of working to help companies make on-prem and cloud work better and more seamlessly together.  Cloud Gateway features in CIO WaterCooler’s latest Practitioner’s Brief.

My 2021 tech prediction is that we will find more ways to use technology to help us to have technologies co-exist for the better and to manage the changes and transformations more naturally from one to the other without the need for the equivalent of ‘project lockdowns’ where we can’t move forward until it’s finished……we will see how it turns out.