Computer science

Major awards and recognition for computer science have been limited to mainly the top companies, investment firms and industrial organizations. Even though many have returned their money, few, mainly in technology, will invest big on a project that may fail. Many institutions and universities are hesitant because they think the IT sector is only a luxury where only the large and efficient companies are making money.

Two big performance metrics are the number of high impact and profitable projects and the number of satisfied customers. The former are a sign of a success — a successful startup is rewarded with a lot of recognition, which means many high profile products that customers buy from them.

Unlike this history of computer science in its early days, most were deeply successful. As the 1990s slipped into the 20th century, many projects which originated from computer science are now being used for other industries — including health care, music and fashion.

As modern performance metrics have become more standardized and global, the high impact projects have become more the focus. More knowledge about the complexity and how the IT sector helps industry to maintain their competitive advantage has come from computer science conferences like “Conference on Currency”.

Of course, with the introduction of new technologies like artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and machine learning — the faster the technology changes, the slower we have to be willing to adapt our projects. This includes a constant shift of new projects. Technology development provides the organization with a competitive advantage, where its products become more demand from customers. Organizations are not just investing in IT, but investing in the future and investing in the new technologies, as they become more and more automated. These involve many changes to the IT structure and its processes.

Previously IT investment consisted of purchases of hardware, software and network. In 2014, annual spending will increase by an additional 63.5% from 2014, to reach a total amount of $86 billion.

In terms of cost, approximately 72% of all IT expenditure goes to acquisition of IT equipment and maintenance. These are fields that have high risks, which increases the capital spending in IT and does not leave much for building infrastructure and technology.

Moreover, the investments are not just limited to hardware — every day investments go to infrastructures such as building in subways, mobile networks, warehouses, digital laboratories, data centers and meetings halls. These are new ways of working, and IT investments are also related to financing.

Funding will increase by an additional 43.5% from 2014, to reach a total amount of $112 billion.

Of this amount, 25% ($31 billion) goes to engineering and design of new digital technologies. These projects are often much more complex than engineering projects.

Of course, the digital transformation projects are growing much faster and hence IT investments are expected to grow faster, meaning that more and more resources will be spent.

Many organizations, particularly corporations and large corporations, and even organizations that were conservative on IT, have become more forward-looking and receptive to digital projects. For example, Apple has become the global leader in digital interaction thanks to its introduction of its ad's product. The iPhone’s online payment and transaction system, and its vast application platform. Next coming model will be artificial intelligence, intelligent agents and machine learning.

However, many will be concerned about their future performance once the platform and technology has matured, and the new technologies have become more mature. If the IT system is always agile and efficient, but not flexible enough to deal with continuous change, the IT organization will eventually face the failure. It will take much more than just a few engineers to do a change. But it is almost impossible to keep up the development of large-scale digital products. The product must be continuously updated, so it is like a car. You cannot keep up a car in traffic. If the car is in a traffic, then that is a project failure. Similarly, if a company decided to invest 10 billion dollars on a new website, that is a fail. But investing millions on IT, software and hardware will eventually become essential and productive.

Conclusion:

Big data in the future will change the way we do business. It will be possible to store more information than ever. Not only the data collected from sensors will become more valuable, but the data collected with artificial intelligence technologies will also become more valuable. The data will have a much higher level of demand, in terms of revenue and profitability.

More and more projects will shift from the bottom-line to the performance metrics. These will include many high impact projects. Having the technology development will become more necessary, where many more money are invested.

There is no turning back. Many organizations will not be able to respond to the demand of innovations. A decision should be made based on data science competitions and evaluations, which prove to be a key path towards growing. All groups need to re-assess their investment decisions.