Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2022 Will be the Year of the Empowered Developer
By Florian Schouten, VP, Product Management,
Value Stream Intelligence & Platform at Digital.ai
As businesses across industries reflect on the
innovation and acceleration that was witnessed in the past year, there are a
few key developer trends that will remain top of mind in 2022 - as business
leaders look to fortify operational resilience, further empower their developer
workforces, and gain more value from the modern data stack. Here are some of
the top trends that we can expect to see shape and form the modern software
developer landscape in 2022.
Major
outages from faulty configuration changes will lead to renewed business
interest in governance and risk management approaches.
The current technology landscape is becoming
more complex with the addition and increased use of microservices, cloud
consumption and edge computing. On top of that, companies have increased change
and release velocity to unprecedented levels to keep up with the innovation
demands of ongoing digital transformation initiatives. This means development
pushes bug fixes, new features and entire releases more rapidly into production
- often through a combination of manual and automated changes.
In today's world, the traditional means of
change governance via a change advisory board (CAB) has dimmed in importance in
the interest of providing organizations with more agility - and this has come
at a cost: an elevated risk of change failure and the business disruption that
ensues from it. For example, the widespread Meta outage we saw in early October.
Because of this growing complexity within IT departments, 2022 will see an
increased emphasis on governance and risk management.
AI
will introduce software development teams to the age of augmented analytics.
AI's next shining moment will be empowering
humans with data-driven recommendations for business decisions, across
industries, in the form of augmented analytics. With an increased emphasis on
governance and risk, we are going to see AI better predict risk around software
release schedules to better inform companies of why that release is at risk, providing deeper insights and allowing
companies to avoid detrimental errors like the ones Facebook and Twitch could
not.
The
modern data stack will mature, bringing enhanced productivity to all data users.
The modern tech stack has been discussed at
length - but 2022 will be all about the modern data stack, as companies strive to emulate data best practices for
the digital world. The data stack has evolved alongside the tech stack, with
ELT capabilities in the early days growing to encompass a cloud data
warehousing layer and data governance layer, and now expanding to include
advanced visualization tools and a metrics layer. Analytics techniques will be
increasingly integrated into a company's DNA to gain competitive advantage -
and will mark the next step of productivity for data users.
IT
teams will gain a bigger seat at the table with enhanced value streams.
Despite spending billions on digital
transformation, global enterprises are still struggling to deliver digital
value. Why? Because pieced-together point solutions can't handle the demands of
enterprise organizations. Value Stream Management (VSM) promotes the use of
systems-thinking to optimize the whole - not just the parts. In 2020, the
pandemic made every organization realize the need to become a digital business,
and since then, the accelerated rate of change has pressured organizations to
become extremely agile. Accomplishing this goal requires aligning
business and development value streams to operate together with a shared
mission, vision, and cadence - and the secret sauce is VSM.
In short, 2022 will be the year of the
empowered developer. Comprehensive data platforms (like VSM) and augmented
analytics that enable developers to manage, maintain and accelerate innovation
across the business will see the largest growth and adoption in the new year,
as organizations increasingly turn to the developer workforce to propel their
growth in this new era of business.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Florian Schouten, VP, Product Management,
Value Stream Intelligence & Platform at Digital.ai
Florian Schouten is VP of Product Management,
Value Stream Intelligence and Platform for Digital.ai, a technology company
dedicated to helping Global 5000 enterprises achieve digital transformation
goals. Using value stream management as its cornerstone, Digital.ai combines
innovative technologies in agile planning, application protection, software
delivery, and artificial intelligence into a unified Value Stream Platform.