ManageEngine continues our weekly blog series called Talk to ME Tuesday. Each week we discuss interesting topics from the world of technology with you, the people that live and breathe it everyday.
People are consumed with the Long Now, which is the period from today out to 36 months. Three years from now is not the future. In IT, the future is at least 3-5 years from now, and sadly 81 percent of organizations are not planning for that period, said Thornton May, Futurist and co-chairman of the IT Leadership Summit at this year’s Interop conference in Las Vegas.
Unfortunately, IT organizations spend, if they’re lucky, 10 percent of their time strategically thinking about and planning for the future. Too much of our time is spent playing catch up, said May. We’re moving into a golden era of IT and we need to take advantage of it.
To prove his theory that people don’t think about the future, May asked the attendees of the IT Leadership Summit to divide up the periods of time from 1987 to 2017 into computational models. How were we and will we be defined by technology? He gave the attendees minutes for the exercise. Like May expected, everyone worked on the past had no answer for the future. They all said that they ran out of time.
Companies who don’t plan for next are strategically vulnerable to companies that are disruptive, May continued. You have to think about the future. Quoting Moshe Rubenstein, May said, “The purpose of strategy is to render the competition irrelevant.” The technologies we have today can create a competitive space. Build your strategy today to future proof your business.
“Creating a five year lead means that [your competition is] unwilling or unable to match your offer in the marketplace,” May said.
