Each Thursday, IT Origins brings you interviews with engineers, executives, and entrepreneurs with interesting stories to tell in IT. We dig into how they got their start in the industry, how it has changed since then, and where they see it going.
One question that always gets an interesting response is “what are the best/worst trends in IT”. Not surprisingly, depending on who you ask, a given trend can be both. In fact, in our interview with Chandra Ambadipudi, he said “data” embodied both. So for this week’s IT Origins, we wanted to open up the question to our community. We put together a quick survey, asking for your best and worst trends right now in the industry. In the meantime, we collected some responses to share in this post.
Best and Worst Trends In IT Survey
Results
Max Mortillaro
Best: AI / ML are a great trend and are one of the most promising growth areas, if applied and marketed appropriately. Unfortunately, there’s no AI for stupid, so while AI and ML will be able to help on a lot of things (especially with enhancing predictive analytics), we shouldn’t count on AI in these initial stages, to make sense out of stupid processes.
Worst: Digital Disruption or Digital Transformation. I hate this wording. It’s like the worst placeholder ever. It’s IT’s own version of “thoughts & prayers”. A shooting? Here you go, some thoughts & prayers. A keynote? Here you go, have some Digital Transformation please. If Josef Stalin was alive these days he would sent people who say this to dig on the Volga-Don Canal. It is vague and doesn’t say anything. What is “Digital Transformation” exactly? Is retiring my fax and replacing it with email an example of it? Or is it the build-up of Edge Computing and IoT? Some clarity would be great.
Paul Woodward Jr
Best: The growth of community involvement; the trend towards companies fostering an environment of inclusion. Admins helping admins versus the “I know more than you” culture of years past.
Worst: Rushing to the cloud because Company X is doing it, or the CIO read about it once. It’s a decision that takes tons of research and preparation which many companies are not prepared to make. Cloud is not the savior of your company’s IT problems.
Jarett Kulm
Best: Machine Learning, though it’s overly difficult to adopt into the mainstream datacenter as TensorFlow, Caffe2 are arduous to use without a data science background.
Worst: The ever evolving and undefinable Hyper-Converged space.
Thom Greene
Best: APIs becoming core to the platform and not a bolt on with limited subsets across hardware and software.
Worst: “Lift and Shift” workloads into a public cloud without refactoring or planning.
Dan Frith
Best: More people are taking data security, integrity and protection seriously.
Worst: “I want it to have App Store functionality”. But we’re a construction company, not a damn software company.
