Future-oriented: New School of IT

The “New School of IT” unites the different currents to a holistic approach. It also derives recommendations for companies and IT decision-makers. The digital industries are undergoing radical changes. Three current trends have an impact on business models, processes and organizations


The world is mobile


Mobility, agility and elasticity. Against this background, IT departments have to redefine their role within the company. The "New School of IT" shows how the trends look in detail, how they relate, and how IT managers can actively support the shaping of the entrepreneur's future.


The world is becoming more and more agile


New software is required: easy-to-use, easy-to-integrate applications. IT departments need to create them faster, deploy them more quickly, change them faster, and run faster with


IT becomes elastic - or enters the museum


Partnerships. All this happens in the context of the progressive automation and digitization of business processes. How this can work, the New School of IT describes.


Everything depends on


Mobility is now increasing in all industries. Almost everywhere the central business processes have mobile or at least mobilizable shares. Often, customers and suppliers can be integrated via web-based applications or through apps. The realization of such solutions must often take place quickly. The goal is to bring new products or services to the market in the short term, often across many different sales channels. At the same time, the special features of mobile developments should not be overlooked in the design and quality assurance.


A few basic questions are still open: Will apps or rather browser-based systems be used? Can the catalyst for the latter HTML5 be? Which platforms must be supported? Is the trend towards Windows or Android? Will cross-platform development approaches and tools be sufficient to serve the different platforms with a single source?


In addition to these technical questions, more complex, more procedural mobile solutions also raise methodological questions: How can those parts of business processes, which should be supported in a meaningful manner, be determined reliably? How can these elements be connected to the software to support the stationary parts?


The trend towards agility in software development is omnipresent: software is to be developed and deployed quickly - often even without first clarifying in detail what this software should do. Industry knowledge plays an important role. It is important to keep an eye on which functionalities are needed and which are not. The budget security is not to be abandoned, of course.


These demands lead from the methods of strict agility, such as Scrum, to "tamed" agility, which strives to achieve a compromise between planning security and flexibility. The practice in large-scale projects and product-related development processes often means that agile processes are embedded in more plan-oriented processes, such as product and requirements management. There is a risk that, at the end of the project, the agile software will impact on the not yet very agile processes of deployment, fault-prone, innovation-inhibiting and tayloristic processes can then counteract the positive effects of agile developments

The agility of the IT is thus fueled in two ways: On the one hand, because users make higher demands on the availability and flexibility of IT. On the other hand, business processes and models are changing faster and the supporting IT has to be changed accordingly.


Process knowledge is required in the areas of "software development and operation". DevOps-like organizational forms - the meaning of the close cooperation between development (development) and operation (operations) - or automated processes in the context of "continuous integration and delivery". For application development, methods such as "adVANTAGE" from adesso and the Interaction Room are suitable.


In the internal organization and optimization of business processes, the identification of essential business processes and market-differentiating core competences is decisive today as opposed to supporting processes. The goal may be to supply the latter to external service providers. This results in newly designed process landscapes that encompass multiple and different interfaces to external processes and partners.


The times of completely closed, consistent and equally trustworthy "data budgets" are over: It is necessary to flexibly involve foreign data sources of different formats, consistency and credibility. Changing performance requirements for rapidly increasing user numbers must be satisfied ad hoc.


Troublesome and lengthy procurement and installation processes need to be eliminated. Then the digital integration of all business processes gives the company a previously unattainable elasticity.


The appropriate technical concepts are in particular cloud computing and virtualization, big-data-capable architectures as well as NoSQL databases


The three trends are closely linked. If one of them appears on the company's IT agenda, it can be expected that the two others will follow. Software and business processes that are to be mobilized require a resilient infrastructure in the background. This is the only way to handle unpredictable utilization peaks.


If, on the other hand, the plan is to make the systems more elastic, companies have to deal with the issue of "agility" almost inevitably. At the latest, this quickly means that business processes must be mobilized.


Future projects must be examined to see if they cover all three aspects. Companies should take advantage of tried and tested methods and tried and tested solutions that enable the approaches of the "New School of IT" to be available in practice and at a manageable risk.