Forward to the past: IT departments of companies 2018
What does every company strive for? Of course, to the growth and improvement of key indicators. The activity of managers and departments within enterprises is constantly changing, trying (and not trying too) to constantly correspond to market fluctuations. I work in a large corporation and observe the actions of many medium and small companies that want to become big. Why do some succeed, while others do not? In this article, I decided to share some observations with you, and I suggest thinking together.
A steady tendency to expand the IT market has been observed for more than a dozen years in a row. However, for some reason today we see a statement in the news that “The Age of Programmers is Over”. But indeed, initially the pace of the introduction of advanced technologies was quite high. But, after several years ago an increasing number of solutions began to encounter a quality problem, the pace of the emergence of new professional specialists and software releases slowed down a bit. Later, amid the global economic crisis, the decline of many companies led to cuts in allocated budgets, which in turn affected the slowdown in the growth of the industry as a whole.
The factors listed above over the past few years have had a constant impact on the IT market. At the end of 2017, there is a higher threshold for entering IT for new specialists: by knowledge, experience, completed projects. Also, more and more companies are paying attention to the quality of products, as testing, fixing bugs takes a lot of resources. At the same time, sometimes talk about saving and optimizing work processes within leading enterprises goes further. Ask yourself a question now: do you know the IT department in any offline company that works completely remotely?
I know that for many here the remote work of the IT department will not be news. But, if we return from the clouds to the earth, we recall that such a practice today is already ending its application in leading global IT corporations, for example Apple and IBM. The tasks and results of successful corporations cited as an example are several years ahead of the market. Now let's look at a large number of enterprises, companies, start-ups that are only developing their IT departments and introducing or launching new products. Just here you can see exactly those issues that can be solved by transferring the type of cooperation with IT specialists (and not only) to a remote basis.
If we take a little deeper and look at the open statistics of freelance services, we can see how more and more specialists with an age of more than 40 years appear on freelance. It's not about unemployment in old age. Among them are many competent architects, people with entrepreneurial experience, and long experience as engineers in design bureaus. The market dictates new conditions and makes adjustments to the portrait of a modern freelancer. Design and layout is becoming more professional, and increasing age and the accumulation of experience among yesterday's youth, such as programmers, begins to positively affect the quality of writing application code.
The development and emergence of new technologies also makes its changes in the IT direction. The use of new tools and integration with various online services allows you to more quickly and efficiently monitor the work processes of remote employees. Cloud solutions, for example, 1C accounting software, have long been offering remote data storage and access to company employees. And not only from the office, but also from home. Talking and reminding about the usefulness of task managers for team work is most likely pointless. Time trackers, Skype, checks during the working day - is it necessary to continue the list of tools with which a remote employee from home on a business day is often closer than a similar employee on another floor of the office?
Actually, this was the main reason for the growth of a large number of companies in 2017. After all, whatever one may say, almost everything depends on the staff. And as it turned out as a result of my small survey among acquaintances who went well up in 2017, they really worked a lot with staff and transferred almost all positions to a remote base. Watching the success of large corporations, they looked for ways to not only find high-class specialists, but also to retain them. In addition to various goodies, one of the most successful solutions turned out to be, so to speak, “freelance”. Not only was it possible to save money on renting an office, but also on the same already real freelance, some managed to find “fresh working brains”.
Summing up, I think we can say that next year for medium and large businesses one of the best solutions for optimizing IT departments will be the transition to remote cooperation. Speaking about our corporation, the successful examples of our customers, this allows us to reduce overall costs and get better quality tasks. I will not advertise freelancers right now, but if you immerse yourself in their atmosphere a little, you can also quite agree that for them the constant remote work with the company is called “I have a good large customer”. Let us recall here that the general requirement to improve the quality of IT products leads to the emergence of demand for professional services, and this corresponds to an increase in the number of offers from experienced freelance specialists in the last couple of years.
At the end of this brief thought / forecast, I remind you that integrations with third-party services and the introduction of modern solutions lead to an increase in the efficiency of company personnel. Now, analyzing the outgoing year, we at our company understand that, in fact, only one announcement at the beginning of 2017 that we are all moving now to a remote location and that we can no longer go to the office allowed us to complete all the tasks of the current year already in mid-October. From myself, I can add that there is more order in the tasks and documents, and the presence of almost 2 free months at the end of the year, according to the additional plan and forecast, will give us about 10% of additional growth in the main indicators. Such a simple secret, following market trends, allows us, a large corporation, to grow even faster, and our customers and partners to become small medium ones,
A steady tendency to expand the IT market has been observed for more than a dozen years in a row. However, for some reason today we see a statement in the news that “The Age of Programmers is Over”. But indeed, initially the pace of the introduction of advanced technologies was quite high. But, after several years ago an increasing number of solutions began to encounter a quality problem, the pace of the emergence of new professional specialists and software releases slowed down a bit. Later, amid the global economic crisis, the decline of many companies led to cuts in allocated budgets, which in turn affected the slowdown in the growth of the industry as a whole.
The factors listed above over the past few years have had a constant impact on the IT market. At the end of 2017, there is a higher threshold for entering IT for new specialists: by knowledge, experience, completed projects. Also, more and more companies are paying attention to the quality of products, as testing, fixing bugs takes a lot of resources. At the same time, sometimes talk about saving and optimizing work processes within leading enterprises goes further. Ask yourself a question now: do you know the IT department in any offline company that works completely remotely?
Today tomorrow will be yesterday
I know that for many here the remote work of the IT department will not be news. But, if we return from the clouds to the earth, we recall that such a practice today is already ending its application in leading global IT corporations, for example Apple and IBM. The tasks and results of successful corporations cited as an example are several years ahead of the market. Now let's look at a large number of enterprises, companies, start-ups that are only developing their IT departments and introducing or launching new products. Just here you can see exactly those issues that can be solved by transferring the type of cooperation with IT specialists (and not only) to a remote basis.
If we take a little deeper and look at the open statistics of freelance services, we can see how more and more specialists with an age of more than 40 years appear on freelance. It's not about unemployment in old age. Among them are many competent architects, people with entrepreneurial experience, and long experience as engineers in design bureaus. The market dictates new conditions and makes adjustments to the portrait of a modern freelancer. Design and layout is becoming more professional, and increasing age and the accumulation of experience among yesterday's youth, such as programmers, begins to positively affect the quality of writing application code.
The development and emergence of new technologies also makes its changes in the IT direction. The use of new tools and integration with various online services allows you to more quickly and efficiently monitor the work processes of remote employees. Cloud solutions, for example, 1C accounting software, have long been offering remote data storage and access to company employees. And not only from the office, but also from home. Talking and reminding about the usefulness of task managers for team work is most likely pointless. Time trackers, Skype, checks during the working day - is it necessary to continue the list of tools with which a remote employee from home on a business day is often closer than a similar employee on another floor of the office?
What to implement and how to plan?
Actually, this was the main reason for the growth of a large number of companies in 2017. After all, whatever one may say, almost everything depends on the staff. And as it turned out as a result of my small survey among acquaintances who went well up in 2017, they really worked a lot with staff and transferred almost all positions to a remote base. Watching the success of large corporations, they looked for ways to not only find high-class specialists, but also to retain them. In addition to various goodies, one of the most successful solutions turned out to be, so to speak, “freelance”. Not only was it possible to save money on renting an office, but also on the same already real freelance, some managed to find “fresh working brains”.
Summing up, I think we can say that next year for medium and large businesses one of the best solutions for optimizing IT departments will be the transition to remote cooperation. Speaking about our corporation, the successful examples of our customers, this allows us to reduce overall costs and get better quality tasks. I will not advertise freelancers right now, but if you immerse yourself in their atmosphere a little, you can also quite agree that for them the constant remote work with the company is called “I have a good large customer”. Let us recall here that the general requirement to improve the quality of IT products leads to the emergence of demand for professional services, and this corresponds to an increase in the number of offers from experienced freelance specialists in the last couple of years.
At the end of this brief thought / forecast, I remind you that integrations with third-party services and the introduction of modern solutions lead to an increase in the efficiency of company personnel. Now, analyzing the outgoing year, we at our company understand that, in fact, only one announcement at the beginning of 2017 that we are all moving now to a remote location and that we can no longer go to the office allowed us to complete all the tasks of the current year already in mid-October. From myself, I can add that there is more order in the tasks and documents, and the presence of almost 2 free months at the end of the year, according to the additional plan and forecast, will give us about 10% of additional growth in the main indicators. Such a simple secret, following market trends, allows us, a large corporation, to grow even faster, and our customers and partners to become small medium ones,
