Wirtschaft digital Baden-Württemberg
  • The IT sector

    Opportunities for the IT sector

    The IT (information technology) sector includes companies dealing in the broadest sense with hardware and software, the Internet, mobile phones and the automated processing of data. Although these companies are thus part of the services sector, they are sometimes classified as an independent – i.e. IT – sector.

    Digitalisation in the IT sector

    The It sector drives the digitalisation in several other sectors, but is also subject to digital change itself because the requirements of the sector’s customers also changed significantly in recent years. Today, production machines exchange data among each other, organisations are shifting their IT infrastructure into the cloud, and businesses sell their goods not only from stationary shops, but increasingly also online. The consequence is an enormous increase in the volume of data and in demand for security technologies. Previous off-the-shelf measures are no longer able to cover the resultant diversity of IT solutions.

    Many small and medium-sized IT service providers are therefore being forced to reorganise their business models, with one trend clearly emerging: Functionally isolated and separated IT solutions and applications are being replaced with integrated, particularly creative and made-to-measure IT concepts. New task areas and functions are also emerging: In order to enable the smart and even creative evaluation and use of large amounts of data, the classical engineering analyst is now becoming a data scientist who is both an IT and a technical expert. Business analysts, as the traditional link between departments and the IT team, must also have increasingly profound technical expertise and should also sometimes be able to carry out technical modifications themselves.

    Digitalisation means that companies in the IT sector should reorientate and develop their business models further, access new customer groups and thereby survive in competition. Open business models and new concepts, such as ‘discovery-driven planning’ as a tool for analysing the economic feasibility of new company establishments and market launches, have an important role to play for the development of creative IT products.