IT futurist Ben Pring answers your pressing questions on what’s next for IT

In a wide-ranging conversation, Ben explored themes like how to balance the investment demands of innovation with the service needs of the business, how the operating model of IT is evolving, and which competencies IT pros should be developing now to succeed in the future.

• Watch the on-demand webinar in full to learn about these topics and more.

Short on time? Get a taste of the webinar below with some of the questions attendees asked Ben during the event.

Question: How does the ‘federalist model’ of innovation tie into the ‘great divide’ between business and IT?

Here Ben explored how technology departments have so far structured themselves using the command and control model of the military, meaning everything from strategy and deployment through to management of external service providers is determined from the center.

But that model isn’t sustainable in a world where cheaper technology is being democratized, and where disruptive innovation on the edge of an organization is happening very quickly. Ben explained:

“What I've seen in many of the clients that I work with is this movement into what you might call subsidiarity, or what might be understood in a more sociopolitical context as federalism – the US political model of pushing decisions out to the states.

So I think this is a very, very important dynamic. It's been happening for a while. It's sort of the death of hierarchy.

Hierarchy is not going to give up without a fight, but the ability to push decision making around technology out into the edges of the business where it makes sense, where the business is really making decisions, I think is very, very important.”

Question: How do you ensure scale with decision-making that’s federated?

The risk of federated decision making is, of course, chaos and an inability to scale, so participants were keen to understand how to get the right blend of centralization and federation. From Ben:

“Creating the governance models to do this within a large organisation is not an easy thing to do. Getting the balance of the skill sets right is probably tactically where one needs to spend a lot of attention.

We may have centers of excellence for very particular leading edge skills, but we may not need very large app development teams centrally. We may need bigger sourcing teams centrally, or we may need better security teams centrally.

I think to get to that answer misunderstanding from a central perspective – and then this obviously takes a lot of ongoing communication between the center and the edges – where we deploy which resources. But ultimately that internal central role is an orchestration role rather than creating everything and feeding it out into the federated parts of the business.”

Audience question: What’s your definition of innovation?

With so much of the webinar discussion centered around innovation, participants were eager to talk about what's actually meant by the often-broadly-applied term. Ben shared:
“I don't think we should get too hung up on the definition of innovation other than to say:

Is this actually increasing, improving, strengthening the ability of the organization to compete?

Is this really differentiating in some way?

Is this really meaningful in some way?

And of course, ultimately, that's a judgement that senior people within the firm will make. It's an interesting question, but I think it can only really be answered in the context of what you are trying to do at whatever level of the organization you are responsible for running.”

Question: What’s the emerging role of business technologists?

There’s a growing need for people that can speak the language of the business, and understand what it’s trying to achieve, but that also have enough knowledge of technology to join the dots. Our webinar participants asked for Ben’s thoughts on the emergence of business technologists. Per Ben:

“There's a good news story in which individual people – non-technologists because the means of production are in their own hands – are figuring out a lot of technology related things themselves more quickly. They're not waiting to be told what to do by core, central, internal IT.

And so the smarter progressive leaders realize that we do need to create more, develop more or hire more people who are these so-called centaurs – hybrid people who understand leading-edge tech, but understand how to apply it to whatever discipline that organization is in.

Now of course, that gap is like an accordion — sometimes it stretches, sometimes it compresses. I think we might be in the beginning of a period where it stretches again because the technology is changing so quickly. People who understand the technology and understand the business, they’re going to be potentially a rare breed. But that's absolutely directionally what people should be doing, whichever side of the house they sit on.”

Question: Do AI agents mean the end of coding?

With a lot of talk about AI agents increasingly taking over the work humans are currently doing, one of our attendees was keen to find out whether Ben believes they spell the end of coding. His take:

“I think there's a lot of truth in that. I'm not saying that overnight C++ or Java or Python are going to disappear. But if you are an 18-year-old kid now and you're going to spend a lot of money to learn Java or C++, I'm not sure that's the smartest thing to do, frankly.

People like Bill Gates are very excited about the whole notion of agents because ultimately, to use a computer in the last 50 years, you've needed to learn the language of the computer.

Now the computers are smart enough to be able to speak in our language. And it's English, it's French, it's Spanish, it's Chinese, whatever. But the point is that computer languages decline in importance in the future, rather than increase.”

These are just a handful of the insights from the event. Watch the session for the full story on IT’s evolution, and discover more of Pring’s answers to the function’s most urgent questions.