By Chris Jackson, below, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Six Degrees
The clocks have gone back, the first snow has fallen (and settled), and I think I might have already heard that Maria Carey Christmas song on the radio a few too many times. It all points to the fact that the festive season is here, and 2024 is almost over. It’s also the time when IT decision-makers turn their thoughts to next year’s priorities and set some new departmental goals. Call them corporate New Year’s resolutions if you like.
Setting objectives for the year ahead definitely focuses minds and helps IT teams make more strategic choices when allocating their budgets. But there’s also good reason to look further into the future and set longer-term goals. For example, digital transformation, cloud services adoption, and AI implementation would all benefit from this approach.
That’s why, when we developed our UK SME Cloud Intelligence Report, we asked respondents about their top objectives for the next five years. Here are their top five:
- Developing an IT infrastructure that allows long-term hybrid working
- Increasing automation
- Harnessing AI and machine learning to support business goals
- Outsourcing IT operations where possible and practical
- Improving diversity and inclusivity within the IT team and wider business
I think the common theme linking each objective is the desire to improve productivity and empower higher-performing teams. The top four objectives aim to achieve this by deploying new technology or implementing existing IT solutions in new ways—and by leveraging accessible and reliable data. Improved diversity plays an important role here, too. IT teams with a richer diversity tend to be more productive and innovative and less likely to suffer from groupthink.
Taking a step back, I’d argue that many of these objectives complement each other and encourage productivity gains. For example, enabling hybrid working and boosting diversity allow organisations to attract and retain a wider pool of top talent. Taken together, outsourcing IT operations, increasing automation and harnessing AI all free IT teams to focus on higher-value work that drives productivity and innovation.
Top of the list: Enabling long-term hybrid working
According to our data, developing an IT infrastructure that allows long-term hybrid working is the most important five-year objective for IT decision-makers at SMEs (it was also the second most important objective for 2024).
The key word here is “long-term”: That’s a very different proposition from the rapid response required to support work-from-home legislation during COVID—which often happened at a pace legacy IT systems struggled to cope with.
Hybrid working is now firmly established in the UK. The government’s new workers’ rights package aims to make flexible working the norm where practical, with employers only able to refuse it if they can show reasonable grounds. It might have been possible to create a short-term IT fix to get through COVID. But a longer-term solution that enables sustainable hybrid working is now required. This means ironing out any remaining remote security, data access, identity management, and governance issues.
For some businesses, it might mean getting right back to basics and implementing cloud-based collaborative working solutions. Others may need to have conversations about the viability of BYOD versus corporate-issued laptops and mobile devices—particularly from a distance support perspective. This, in turn, could raise questions about the extent of powers for businesses to manage BYOD security. I wonder if this will ultimately mean a resurgence of remote desktop functionality to separate the corporate domain from an employee’s personal device and network. Time will tell!
Your business and its AI journey
Tackling AI implementation as part of a five-year plan is a smart move too—so long as that plan is already well underway. The last few years have shown us how quickly AI evolves, so we’ll be in an entirely different place with the technology as the new decade approaches. To keep ahead of the curve, organisations should already be in the process of:
- Setting clear AI-related goals and objectives that relate directly to business outcomes.
- Addressing whether AI implementations could impact security, data access and governance policies—and be implementing the appropriate countermeasures.
- Updating data gathering and storage capabilities to provide AI-based applications with the best possible information.
Of course, broader implementation can be phased across multiple years, drawing on knowledge gained from earlier phases and trials—that’s where the longer-term planning comes into play.
This more considered approach should help prevent businesses from falling into the trap of implementing AI for its own sake. It should also ensure organisations get all the efficiencies and benefits from AI without exposing company data to the wrong people—and putting themselves, their employees, their IP and their competitive advantage at risk. That said, AI adoption speeds will vary by sector, with implementations almost routine in some parts of the economy but still very experimental in others.
Looking beyond the top five objectives
These five-year objectives offer valuable insight into IT decision-makers’ future priorities. But it’s curious that tasks related to strengthening IT security and compliance— which could also drive long-term productivity—fail to make the top five.
This makes me wonder if public cloud adoption has led to complacency in these areas—an issue highlighted by the CrowdStrike outages earlier in the year that exposed unnecessary and avoidable vulnerabilities in the way many organisations handle software update management.
The CrowdStrike incident showed us that simply installing a firewall and intrusion protection services and then leaving the systems to run themselves can have catastrophic effects. It’s demonstrated that IT decision-makers can’t afford to step back and assume their public cloud environments—or automated processes—can handle security issues without regular human input and monitoring. So, if I were an IT decision-maker working at an SME, I’d definitely be including at least one IT or cyber security-related objective in my five-year plan. And I’m sure that, reading this, you’re thinking of doing so too—if you haven’t already.
Here’s to a successful 2025 (and 2030)
As the year draws to a close, it’s logical to think about what the next 12 months will bring and how organisations will respond to IT advances and economic changes. But I hope I’ve given a few useful examples of where taking the longer view may ultimately lead to more strategic, considered choices that will reap even greater organisation-wide benefits.
To download a free copy of Six Degrees UK SME Cloud Intelligence Report 2024, click here.
