Full scrip from The Royal Signals Institute Presentation, 21 Nov 2019 at NCSC.

Today’s event is around the future relevance for military information specialists, and I have been asked to highlight trends that will shape or challenge that relevance. This debate is long overdue as the impact of artificial intelligence and digital transformation are accelerating change and disruption across the whole of society, not just in defence. There are obvious challenges – how will AI affect my daily job, even will I still have a job, what will change because of AI, and how soon will it change. However, I want to highlight three deeper challenges.

Unprecedented expansion

The first large trend is the scale of the challenge facing information specialists. 50 billion internet-connected devices are going to come online by 2030. With a global population of 8.5bn, that means six times more devices than people. This also seems a low estimate, and we will probably hit that number of devices by 2025.

90 per cent of the data in the world today was generated in the last two years. Of that, 75% is never actually read – from blogs to how many times you swipe into the underground, the data that we are building is not being exploited. In Defence, the analysis figure for collected data is 95% - only 5% of information collected is analysed and only 1% of data is analysed in near real-time.

This scale is unprecedented and keeping humans at the heart of the analysis is already incredibly difficult and getting far harder. Artificial Intelligence is going to be essential to understand, comprehend and manage this complexity.

Every organisation is a software organisation

Every organisation is now a software organisation. Hiring for software engineers is growing at a rate of 11% faster outside the tech industry than within the tech industry, according to LinkedIn data. The hiring of software engineers in the auto sector is growing at three times the rate of mechanical engineers. Even in sectors and industries that are seeing significant reductions in people, we are seeing a clear growth for software developers.

Today, the military is struggling to attract and retain the best people and maintain their skills. Defence, like every sector, is starting to realise that it needs to attract the right information specialists but is yet to articulate how to present an attractive package within an increasingly competitive market.

The division between Tech and Non-Tech is rapidly vanishing

The traditional model of relying on IT departments to build custom enterprise apps or integrate off the shelf solutions is not fulfilling customer needs to keep up with the pace of change.

Enterprise demand for mobile apps is growing five times faster than IT departments can deliver. At the same time, IT staffs and budgets are facing increasing competition. They are facing a chasm of higher demand, with a shortage of resources. And traditional development cycles for custom apps can take up to a year, depending on complexity. Once they’re deployed, business needs may have already changed.

Architects, Engineers and Users are blurring

Business units and IT departments need a better, faster way to address business needs that’s scalable and flexible – yet maintains control over security and compliance. We are seeing increasing demand by users to develop their solutions using no code or low code capabilities and expecting resource-constrained IT departments to enable rather than hinder that demand.

These changes and new approaches are creating new challenges to everyone on the planet, not just defence, but we can see three big challenges facing information specialists.

The enterprise no longer sits just one side of a fence

The first is around how do we design the future? We see a future where AI systems will interact with other AI systems, where data will be created, updated, amended, even deleted without human interaction. Where one AI system will take data from another, enrich that data, use it to make crucial insights and then pass it to another AI system. The enterprise no longer sits one side of a fence or one route through a complex supply chain. The outcome should be a better world, but only if we design and architect that connected and complicated world with humans at the heart. The challenge facing architects is to comprehend the increasingly complex and, more importantly, to start collaboratively resolving complexity today. 

AI is getting better at the mundane and enhancing the valuable

Our second challenge faces developers. Our current engineers and developers are already struggling to stay ahead of technology and changes. Increasingly we are seeing AI impacting on how engineers develop or build solutions. We see AI being used to review and test solutions, and AI developing code itself. AI is getting better at the mundane and enhancing the value. That pace of change is growing faster yet developers are not adapting faster. Developers need to focus on how AI will complement and enhance how they work, rather than seeking to duplicate or replicate tasks that AI can do better.

Users will be challenged to remain at the heart of a future enterprise that is increasingly AI-driven

Finally, users will be challenged to remain at the heart of a future enterprise that is increasingly AI-driven. On one side this will be a daily issue for the user community. Yet we see users doing those tasks that traditionally were delivered by developers. Users will write their code, they will develop solutions, and AI will help them succeed. If engineers are going to struggle with exploiting AI to improve their ways of working, it will be even harder for users who lack engineering rigour and knowledge to achieve similar tasks.