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Trends – IT Origins Survey

April 19, 2018
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by Rich Stroffolino
  1. Phil Gervasi – IT Origins
  2. Nicholas Russo – IT Origins
  3. James Green – IT Origins
  4. Russ White – IT Origins
  5. Chin-Fah Heoh – IT Origins
  6. Eyvonne Sharp – IT Origins
  7. Howard Marks – IT Origins
  8. Tom Hollingsworth – IT Origins
  9. Allison Sheridan – IT Origins
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  11. Enrico Signoretti – IT Origins
  12. Rebecca Fitzhugh – IT Origins
  13. Matt Leib – IT Origins
  14. Jack Daniel – IT Origins
  15. Tom Lyon – IT Origins
  16. Nick Bowie – IT Origins
  17. Dong Ngo – IT Origins
  18. Jordan Martin – IT Origins
  19. Zachary Smith – IT Origins
  20. Chandra Ambadipudi – IT Origins
  21. Karen Lopez – IT Origins
  22. Sonia Cuff – IT Origins
  23. Trends – IT Origins Survey
  24. Dan Frith – IT Origins
  25. Thom Greene – IT Origins
  26. David Bermingham – IT Origins
  27. Patric Palm – IT Origins
  28. Jon Hildebrand – IT Origins
  29. Ted Dunning – IT Origins
  30. Theresa Miller – IT Origins
  31. Oksana Sokolovsky – IT Origins
  32. John Welsh – IT Origins
  33. Leon Adato – IT Origins
  34. Alastair Cooke – IT Origins
  35. Michelle Laverick – IT Origins
  36. Nick Janetakis – IT Origins
  37. Tomer Shiran – IT Origins
  38. Phoummala Schmitt – IT Origins
  39. Tom Hollingsworth – IT Origins
  40. Becky Elliott – IT Origins
  41. Stephane Charbonneau – IT Origins

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.

About the author

Rich Stroffolino

Rich has been a tech enthusiast since he first used the speech simulator on a Magnavox Odyssey². Current areas of interest include ZFS, the false hopes of memristors, and the oral history of Transmeta.

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