Future-Technology relies on a massive amount of additional software in all areas of life, from cars, to network equipment, to smart-meters, utility or home-automation. An even larger chunk of this additional software will be required to reliably automate, manage and orchestrate and reduce complexity.
As connectivity is becoming a commodity new opportunities in traditional domains open up. This creates demand for Software/IT know-how in nearly all tech industries. It brings professionals with an IT or CompSci background into these more mature industries. It changes the recruitment landscape and with it the organizational culture of many older firms. For example, Telecoms or Automotive firms traditionally preferred to recruit experts from Electrical or Telecommunications Engineering backgrounds with a niche knowledge of their domain. The change from circuit switched to IP based standards opens up a path for IT like never before.
The newcomers arrive with more than just programming skills but bring a radically different view on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and offer alternative angles of approaching old problems. Test and verification departments, Service Delivery and even Customer Care are being radically transformed via Software automation and look nothing like they used to 10 years ago.
Ideas such as Scrum & Kanban, Continuous Improvement are becoming the “new black” also outside IT. This cross pollination benefits all. The example of “DevOps” also shows that old ideas (e.g. Lean management) could be applied on top of new things like Agile to speed up deployment.
No matter which industry we look at, whether Automotive, Energy or Telecommunications, … their development departments are looking increasingly alike. Tech convergence hasn’t just affected R&D or the way we make things, but also company culture and business processes.
All these domains will have one thing in common: A healthy appetite for connectivity and network technologies which leads to the creation of massive volumes of raw-data waiting to be intelligently analysed (Machine Learning).
Due to this convergence Valbonne Consulting now feels at home in many industries. And as a job seeker so should you!