You don’t have to be Technical to get into Technology.

Not everyone can become a great artist,  but a great artist can come from anywhere.– Ratatouille (Movie)

This beautiful saying can touch many lives, as these stories are being told and lived right now by many of us. The only discriminating element that lights up the flares between dream and achievement is the passion that one holds. Passion for excellence is far more practical than the desire to succeed. The only way forward is continual learning and an insatiable hunger to know new things can build bridges between various domains and plateaus irrespective of nature.

I am encouraged to pen down thoughts and share my perspective on the changing socio-technical landscape. This is also an attempt to deconstruct the silos that create a strange feeling of disassociation for the non-technical community with the technology (technical) space. (I was one of the victims too)

However, the unmovable walls that existed between the technical skills and expertise are being demolished by the new frameworks, technologies, and pioneering approaches. That is coupling all adjacent and diagonal specialized ingredients to present a conducive environment to co-exist.

To contextualize – we are experiencing the “genetic engineering of technology,” which has democratized the way we engage with all dimensions of technology without any/or limited consideration to technical competency.

Business process, thought process, are building technologies (Technology evolution) – The core reason for businesses to thrive is the dependency on the technology that supports the interconnected processes. Technology is the life support for any transaction that occurs anywhere in the ecosystem. Then we experienced something called “disruption” that pushed us out of our comfort zone and forced us to look beyond and above. The cause for this disruption is the evolution of technology, the evolution of requirements, summing up to “evolution of possibility”. We have started walking backward from the technology to business to find the prospects, and now we have options and choices unlike a business relying on technology. Previously businesses were impelled to endure within the technology boundaries and find a way to self-adjust and align with the tendered environment. But now the business requirements are pushing the technology to look for adjoining allies and complementing solutions to fulfill the business objective. They are obligated to evolve and expand the potential, horizon, and resilience to stay relevant. Hence technology is evolving like any other organism to naturalize. Now to be accepted with the majority, the technology needs to minimize the complexity of utilizing and implementation to become user-friendly for the audience. This reduces the pain and effort to learn the subject and extends the convenience of utility even to a business user who can compile the desired solution without focusing on technical assistance.

Open source, Crowdsource is the new preferred Source – Talent sources and talent pools in the free market have converged to facilitate technical demands for any technology in an omnipresent fashion. If you can find the use for “it”(any technology component), you can find many sources to create “it” at a very competitive pricing. This lessens the burden on a business user, strategist, entrepreneur to dodge the cost incurred to employ a specialized technical skill resource. The open-source platform is progressing relentlessly to cater to a wide range of user requirements with keeping compatibility, availability, and simplicity with the most eminent service providers in mind. Open source is expanding the playground for the techies to play and build micro solutions, simultaneously crowdsourcing is providing the skilled human resources to practice and mend results on demand. Intricate algorithms & tedious codes are turning into icons, and microservices/applications are transforming into containers that are portable. Here is where the technology is getting increasingly human interface friendly to evade compiling complex codes or algorithms which are being wrapped/transfigured into a graphic representation that can be used with ease. This intramodular arrangement offers a prospect to the non-technical community to get more creative about the design, experience, and strategy to add the required zing to this technical aspect. The way services and solutions offerings are being containerized, there is going to be a need for skills that will facilitate business aspects like product management, Strategic marketing, Research which will be an integral part of every technology initiative.

Business schools are tutoring technology – Top management schools are tutoring new technologies as they have understood the significance to have a business version of the technology for all layers of management. Educational Institutions around the world have started courses to share their representation of technology in a brief and comprehensive scale respectively. One gets to look inside the emerging technology arena and understand the management & process fundamentals – real-time business use cases – pre-requisites – and financials aspects which prepare the resource to participate in the technical discussion with market knowledge and ability to delivery, influence, motivate or direct the teams/organizations/institutions in the respective decision making. The content and context of the technology are morphed to a degree where the technical aspects, language and paradigms are tailored for the management professional to consume. The changing approach of learning the strategy and business aspect is part of the new technology revolution.

The technical skills are most required and applied in today’s world, and it will always have its prominence in the business system. Due to an increasing emphasis on outcomes, attributes, creative outlook, and innovative mindset, the scope for skills like user experience, design thinking, technology operations (AI Ops, Digital Ops, Dev Ops), analytical thinking, problem-solving, product management, and research have secured a prominent place. A brief fundamental knowledge is adequate for such roles to live in this realm and perform alongside the technical masters with equal importance.