Cloud, AI and design systems are the techs exciting CIOs right now
Some of the UK's leading CIOs talk to Computing about the technologies either here or coming soon which they're excited about using in their organisations
The technologies most exciting today's CIO are Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, cloud and design systems.
Computing has spoken to some of the UK's top IT leaders in recent weeks to find out which technologies, either available today or coming over the next couple of years, most interest them.
Mark Holt, CTO at the Trainline, explained that he sees AI as bringing hige benefits to his organisation.
"AI is something we've spent a lot of time on," admitted Holt. "We have lots of services out there, like price and journey time prediction services, running live in production. This will keep growing as an area of focus for any organisation if you're got a great dataset. We have a huge dataset we can mine and create really great products off the back of."
Computing's AI & Machine Learning Live event will be held in Central London on 19th November.
Holt also referenced virtual reality as an up and coming theme.
"Virtual reality - I love it, it's amazing. It's not so relevant to us but it will change the way people inter-relate in three to five years. When you use an Oculus, it's so immersive and compelling, it really feels like you're there.
"With VR video conferencing goes away. You can conduct a real meeting in VR, and it feels just like being in the room. It's a game changer for the way people relate to one another."
Charles Ewen, CTO at the Met Office, said cloud is still the main technology he is looking to leverage.
"Our commitment to cloud is really deep - everything's cloud for us. When I say cloud, this is about transforming our workflow to be suited to instantaneous or serverless computing. We're moving heavily from a batch-produced, file-integrated methodology to an on-demand ephemeral approach. That's massive at the scale we're doing it at.
"Within that we're looking for any opportunity to leverage PaaS capability. We're making lots of compromises in areas like HR systems, finanace, ticketing systems, all the standard stuff. CRM is going very vanilla more than before because we don't have the time.
"Our focus is on business critical systems. In that domain it's all about on-demand pull-based, large-scale cloud. At other end, anything else that's not specific to us as a company, we're effectively forcing the organisation to change to vanilla. Our analysis is those areas where we have developed our own home-cooked or heavily bespoked versions are not giving us enough business advantage when we need to expend time and effort on business systems."
Mark Ridley, until recently the group CTO at startup accelerator Blenheim Chalcot, said that AI and Machine Learning are important, but added that it's design systems that are exciting him today.
"There's a real disconnect between UX [User eXperience] and design and how that flows into development. I've always struggled with. There's this new movement called design ops. It's like dev ops but around integrating high quality UI [User Interface], UX and workflow into a development pattern.
"That will address lots of waste in the discussion between designers wanting to design every component, and developers wanting a procedural way to implement their designs. Spotify, Airbnb and IBM are the leading proponents, they've done lots of work into exposing their design systems to the world."