More flexible and efficient: in Republic of Tatarstan announces the vectors of the it industry development

Global trends

— What trends in the IT sphere of recent years will continue in 2022? What direction should companies in Tatarstan face and what to do now to actively develop in the next year?

A year ago, there was a joke that COVID was the best digital director to push all of us toward digitalization, and it was hard to brush aside the movement in that direction. Therefore, companies should pay attention to technologies that have already proven their effectiveness and will keep growing and largely determine the development of IT. These technologies will continue to impact and improve business efficiency penetrating deeper into business processes. And now, when identifying new technology trends, I am guided both by our experience and by the results of consulting companies engaged in market analysis. For example, the results of Gartner research.

Speaking of global trends, I would focus on cloud platforms. By about 2025, the penetration of various cloud technologies in businesses will reach, if not 100%, then certainly more than 90%. Meanwhile, their penetration in the world today is less than 40%. I believe they will build up their strength.
But speaking of global trends, we must understand that they will, of course, also be implemented by the companies of Tatarstan. The Republic will not follow some special path of development. There are many international companies in Tatarstan, and all these trends will be part of their business practices. I believe it to be the right approach that has proven its effectiveness.

— What other technologies are worth mentioning?
It's worth mentioning Big Data. This is the accumulation of data in specialized repositories. Optimization of the data set handling will be achieved by the creation of Data Fabric. Data processing tools are being developed, and their efficiency is growing. As a result, the number of specialists in data analysis can be reduced, and they are few in the market. At the same time, we can bring the result in the form of new knowledge closer to the consumer.

We cannot do without Data Fabric — it is a crucial technology that will define a lot of things. For example, AI development. Using AI in the operation of enterprises will affect their ability to make extra profit and reduce costs.

The world has changed and there is the "new normal" that IT will be able to support through the trend of globally distributed enterprises, Distributed Enterprise. It is a shift from the concentration of office employees in one geographic location to working with global points of service production. In 2023, the revenues of 75% of businesses that take advantage of the geographically distributed operation model will grow 25% faster as compared to their competitors.
These trends are worth bearing in mind and talking about. I'm sure that they will be even more pronounced in 2022 and 2023. If you want to be more flexible and efficient, you have to use them in your work one way or another.

Remote work

— When the COVID-19 pandemic is over, will all employees return to their workplaces or will the remote work format stay with us?

For ourselves, we concluded that the hybrid model is more effective for the organization of work. However, fully remote work is difficult to imagine. It is possible only in some extreme situations. Currently, our means of production and working methods are such that we are not tied to machines or other tools concentrated in an office. We can have distributed means of production because our main value is knowledge and qualifications. People can now easily be brought together virtually, including through IT and visual workgroups.

I believe that in the long run, the preponderance of remote work does affect team effectiveness, dilutes team spirit and the feeling of connection to other people. At first, you may not even notice it.
During our emergency switch to remote work in 2020, it took us about a week to fix some technical issues, revise some of the business processes, change the authorization structure, and help the teams go completely remote.

However, we have long understood the benefits that a mature remote working model could provide, especially in a tight resource market of professionals. That’s why we set ourselves the goal of creating the conditions to effectively engage employees from anywhere in the world. Back in 2018, we began to prepare, to change internal processes, to adapt them to the increase in the number of remote employees. Yes, we could not predict COVID, but when it happened, we were as prepared as possible.
Although initially, we had rather unambitious plans: for example, we planned to reach 20–25% of remote employees at the beginning of 2020. But due to the pandemic, there appeared an abrupt need for 95% of our workforce to go remote. Even now we can say that we succeeded in the emergency transition to remote work, and none of our customers noticed any changes in the quality of our services.

Read the full interview at RBC Tatarstan