The day mankind discovered fire, they also discovered the future possibilities of unearthing mysteries. The quest for knowing the unknowns still continues. Standing at 2020s, one certainly wonders and relishes the gift of technologies in various fields. Among the technologies, one must observe the giant leap in field of computation. Supercomputers of earlier eras are now available in form of smartphones fitted within one’s palm. High power of computations has enabled too many possibilities in the field of Artificial Intelligence – Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and, the list just goes on. Quantum computing is the latest buzzword in computation, and it has got lots of potential that we are going to experience in coming time.

The famous saying goes by “the only way to predict the future is to create it”. Today’s prescriptive analytics seem to be practically proving that every day. Armed with powerful computing systems available, complex statistical and probabilistic theories can be practically experienced in modern day computers. That is a big boon for today’s generation. With molecular computing becoming a possibility, even Moore’s law may not last long.

By keeping pace with technological advancement, IT industries have evolved as well. Smart tools and techniques are helping business to grow in all directions. As a technical project manager managing IT projects, I see four major fields that are moving fast. We must understand them, assimilate them and then adapt them.

One is certainly the way projects are going to be planned, managed, monitored and executed. With advancement of AI and other automated tools, there is large scope to move towards hybrid project management wherein there will be a mix of approaches – traditional as well as relevant, and also there will be a balance between transactional and transformational project management. This will help bring the right communications between people and tasks, which will ensure the stability, resilience, efficiency and also engagement.

Second field is related to fast-paced development, delivery and operationalization of software products or services. DevOps practices bring the software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) together seamlessly. CI/CD has been a core part of these practices. This perfectly jells with Agile methodologies wherein development team can focus on business requirements, code development and quality maintenance, and then leave the deliverables to deployment which is automated. Software design and architecture is also adapting fast – Microservices, AsyncAPI, Data Mesh, Micro Frontends and many more. Containerization ( Docker) and Orchestration ( Docker Swarm, Kubernetes etc.) of software provides an amazing way to develop, distribute, and run along with multi-clustered environment at scale in efficient manner.

The third field is to stay relevant on the enormous growth in AI and Data Science. Data Sciences along with Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, NLP, CV, RPA and Graph already established themselves as having the right potential to dominate next future. As I said earlier, here is the era to know future, successful business depends on data intelligence. Data intelligence depends on AI and its various powerful subfields.

The fourth major field is the computation itself – parallel distributed processing, cloud computing and traditional on-prem has been growing fast. A vast and wide range of offerings from cloud services has already dominating to expand all kinds of businesses. The latest on this is probably the “Edge Computing”. The cost of bandwidth between cloud servers and clients has been a concern. Edge Computing offers to run some of the processes in cloud side and pass remaining ones to client side or to edge server and this way it tries to bridge the gap between long-distance communication between cloud server and client.

From fire to wheel, from a stone tablet in a cave to a digital tablet in a space laboratory, from vacuum tube computing to cloud computing, mankind kept discovering possibilities. This had an epoch start, but for sure, there is no end……

I use this website to write articles, share my thoughts and publish any interesting technical topics that I come across.

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