New IT roles and responsibilities

If you work in the IT department of an organization (regardless of your position), try to ask yourself how much your responsibilities and tasks have changed in recent years. I’m pretty sure you’ll find you are doing, even in the same role, a lot more than before.

This is the result of “the imperative to generate more business value using innovative technologies and approaches to information”, to use Gartner’s words. “Each IT role faces specific challenges—from planning and supporting digital acceleration to integrating more strategically with the rest of the business”.

Digital acceleration and the proliferation of multi-cloud infrastructures and AI-enabled processes have transformed the scope of IT, bringing it closer to the business. Alongside the technology evolution, new roles have emerged, and existing ones have evolved into consulting engineers and “business-like” roles. IT-professionals are architects, data engineers, data scientists, DevOps engineers, and advisors creating and managing governance rules and an ecosystem of external providers and vendors.

The demand of enablement and empowerment

New and expanded IT roles require new strategies of enablement and empowerment. The more IT can autonomously access and leverage different tools and technologies, the more it will be effective in helping the business. The other side of this equation is also true. Enablement and empowerment strategies lead to expanded roles, where more users can exploit technologies and capabilities beyond their traditional range of expertise.

This is no surprise in the era of democratization of technology when the technology rapidly continues to become more accessible even outside of technical roles within an organization.

Enablement and empowerment principles are also encouraged by self-service culture, where users throughout the organization expect autonomous access and adoption of tools.