The Hottest Buzzword for the Future of IT

There’s no way around it: In the future, IT will have to face things that – as I see it – lie outside of its comfort zone. Engineers and IT specialists are perfectly comfortable with servers, BYOD, bits and bytes, bandwidth, RAID, DLP, networks, APIs, firewalls, UPS, middleware, and infrastructure. Over the next few years, though, they’ll need to move past this familiar territory and shift their focus to creativity. That’s because creativity is the hottest buzzword for the future of IT.

It can’t be captured and analyzed, or reviewed using (flow)charts. How do you measure creativity, actually? The futile attempts that neuroscientists have made to do just that haven’t really yielded any insights. Nowadays, we generally explain creativity in a reductive way: as a quality associated with the right hemisphere of the brain. Meanwhile, logic and analysis – standbys in the field of IT – belong to the brain’s left hemisphere. Of course, the brain is a bit more complicated than this simple binary opposition would suggest. That being said, common sense tells us that using analysis and creativity in equal measure can definitely boost the quality of our brainstorming.

And that’s extremely helpful, since innovation (in IT and elsewhere) doesn’t come from applying logic alone. As far as that’s concerned, an international team of scientists has carried out some research that yielded promising results. The team found that particular parts of the brains of highly innovative people work differently from other human brains – these parts communicate with each other more closely and therefore yield more creative output. For a more technical description of how this works, take a look here. Who knows – maybe we can train interactions within our brains someday. Perhaps that could even become a part of daily IT tasks: strategy meeting at 11, security meeting at 2, help desk organization at 3, and creativity training at 4.

From the very start of the discourse surrounding digital transformation, we have known that the field of IT (and other fields, too) has to radically rethink things: There’s a need to become more creative, communicative, quick, entrepreneurial, and innovative. While fundamental IT activities are crucial, they will no longer suffice in the future. The new business models on the rise are closely intertwined with IT, which will have to adapt accordingly. The more innovative a company and its IT are, the better it can design future business models – and, in turn, the better it can secure its competitive advantages.

That’s why I find the upcoming Dell Technologies World, which will be held in Las Vegas, so incredibly exciting: The event won’t just focus on products, technologies, or applications; it will also explore the ways in which all of these are combined with entrepreneurial visions. Dell Technologies World revolves around the true digital transformation, in keeping with the event slogan, ‘Make it Real.’ That’s what we’re all dealing with: the future of business, powered by creativity and innovation.