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The Future of Work, Enabled by the Democratization of IT

Rajesh Ganesan
ManageEngine

After the pandemic caused remote work to become the norm for many organizations, IT personnel were propelled onto the front lines. The businesses that survived — and, in many cases, thrived — were able to do so because of their IT departments. As organizations slowly begin to emerge from the pandemic, it's an apt time to take an assessment of the future of work.

The future of work will be led by democratized IT, whereby employees work in a distributed, asynchronous manner, accessing the requisite tools wherever and whenever they need. Enabled by the democratization of IT, this work will be (1) self-organizing, (2) high velocity, and (3) digitally dexterous. Let's discuss each of these attributes in turn.

1. Self-Organizing Work

Historically, organizations adhered to traditional organizational charts and formal hierarchies. Generally speaking, employees worked onsite, were assigned to a team, and were given a well-defined scope of work. Things really have changed. Now, hybrid and remote workers organize themselves and expand the scope of their own work, often without centralized oversight. As a quick example, a team working remotely may not have a dedicated human resources representative, so a team member may take the reins, supplementing his or her core tasks with the requisite HR duties.

2. High Velocity Work

No longer do employees have to concern themselves with long commute times; nor do they have to follow strict 9am - 5pm schedules or act busy when their bosses approach. Given the nature of hybrid and remote work, work times and location are increasingly irrelevant; now, outcomes and deliverables rule the day.

Seeing as employees can work wherever and whenever they want, they will most often choose the unique times and places that allow them to complete their tasks most efficiently. Liberated from arbitrary work confines that would otherwise slow them down, employees now operate at accelerated speeds. Moreover, and perhaps best of all, not only does their work get completed faster, but employees also have more time to pursue hobbies and interests outside of work as well.

3. Digitally Dexterous Work

Most hybrid workers are doing remote-first, and digitally dexterous, work. Moving forward, IT personnel will need to continue to provide employees with frictionless security and decentralized technologies that allow employees to work from different devices, times, and locations.

We are already seeing this highly digital landscape thrive, and workforces will only become more digitally dexterous in the future — especially as the general population grows more tech-savvy and younger demographics enter the workforce. We've seen that workers are becoming increasingly comfortable with AI, chatbots, and other technologies that automate routine processes.

The Democratization of IT

IT personnel are vital to every company's success, and they lead organization-wide transformations. Moreover, the future of work is enabled by the democratization of IT. That said, exactly what is meant by the democratization of IT?

Essentially, it means that IT personnel are cross-functional, as they handle security, operations, and desktop support, among other disciplines. Additionally, IT processes intermix with traditional business processes, enabling automated workflows that span across departments. Also, using analytics, IT personnel work to monitor and foster the overall experiences of customers and employees.

Democratized IT describes IT personnel who embrace this new decentralized, remote, and frequently autonomous nature of work, while simultaneously keeping their corporate networks safe. It is not hyperbole to say that the future of work is dependent upon the democratization of IT. And, for the foreseeable future, work will continue to be self-organizing, high velocity, and digitally dexterous.

Rajesh Ganesan is President of ManageEngine

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The Future of Work, Enabled by the Democratization of IT

Rajesh Ganesan
ManageEngine

After the pandemic caused remote work to become the norm for many organizations, IT personnel were propelled onto the front lines. The businesses that survived — and, in many cases, thrived — were able to do so because of their IT departments. As organizations slowly begin to emerge from the pandemic, it's an apt time to take an assessment of the future of work.

The future of work will be led by democratized IT, whereby employees work in a distributed, asynchronous manner, accessing the requisite tools wherever and whenever they need. Enabled by the democratization of IT, this work will be (1) self-organizing, (2) high velocity, and (3) digitally dexterous. Let's discuss each of these attributes in turn.

1. Self-Organizing Work

Historically, organizations adhered to traditional organizational charts and formal hierarchies. Generally speaking, employees worked onsite, were assigned to a team, and were given a well-defined scope of work. Things really have changed. Now, hybrid and remote workers organize themselves and expand the scope of their own work, often without centralized oversight. As a quick example, a team working remotely may not have a dedicated human resources representative, so a team member may take the reins, supplementing his or her core tasks with the requisite HR duties.

2. High Velocity Work

No longer do employees have to concern themselves with long commute times; nor do they have to follow strict 9am - 5pm schedules or act busy when their bosses approach. Given the nature of hybrid and remote work, work times and location are increasingly irrelevant; now, outcomes and deliverables rule the day.

Seeing as employees can work wherever and whenever they want, they will most often choose the unique times and places that allow them to complete their tasks most efficiently. Liberated from arbitrary work confines that would otherwise slow them down, employees now operate at accelerated speeds. Moreover, and perhaps best of all, not only does their work get completed faster, but employees also have more time to pursue hobbies and interests outside of work as well.

3. Digitally Dexterous Work

Most hybrid workers are doing remote-first, and digitally dexterous, work. Moving forward, IT personnel will need to continue to provide employees with frictionless security and decentralized technologies that allow employees to work from different devices, times, and locations.

We are already seeing this highly digital landscape thrive, and workforces will only become more digitally dexterous in the future — especially as the general population grows more tech-savvy and younger demographics enter the workforce. We've seen that workers are becoming increasingly comfortable with AI, chatbots, and other technologies that automate routine processes.

The Democratization of IT

IT personnel are vital to every company's success, and they lead organization-wide transformations. Moreover, the future of work is enabled by the democratization of IT. That said, exactly what is meant by the democratization of IT?

Essentially, it means that IT personnel are cross-functional, as they handle security, operations, and desktop support, among other disciplines. Additionally, IT processes intermix with traditional business processes, enabling automated workflows that span across departments. Also, using analytics, IT personnel work to monitor and foster the overall experiences of customers and employees.

Democratized IT describes IT personnel who embrace this new decentralized, remote, and frequently autonomous nature of work, while simultaneously keeping their corporate networks safe. It is not hyperbole to say that the future of work is dependent upon the democratization of IT. And, for the foreseeable future, work will continue to be self-organizing, high velocity, and digitally dexterous.

Rajesh Ganesan is President of ManageEngine

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As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...