Will IT departments become obsolete?
Here in Orlando at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit 2007, Peter Cochrane, co-founder of a U.K. based company called ConceptLabs, gave an interesting keynote address.
He predicts that corporate IT departments will disappear the same way typing pools have, and for all the same reasons — the main one being, self reliance.
The workforce of the future is already technologically literate. They create their own videos on YouTube and look towards Wiki’s for information. “As those of you with children are aware, they know much more than most of us do. Your children are probably your IT department at home,” Cochrane said.
The laughter of the crowd of at least a couple hundred attendees here signaled agreement.
There is more of a “do-it-yourself” attitude today, Cochrane said. He pointed to an energy company called BP based in the U.K that pays employees $4,000 bonus if they do not use the IT department.
I wonder if there are similar programs springing up in the corporate world, where users are discouraged from using IT services to encourage self-reliance. Reminds me of the old days when we used to rely on tellers at banks. My bank now charges a penalty for using a teller instead of an ATM.
Maybe you IT guys and gals need to blow the dust off that resume.
Posted: June 11th, 2007 under Data center job market and career advancement.
Companies who use IT strategically will always have an “IT Department”, but very few companies actually DO view IT as a strategic tool. Instead they view it as a cost-center, or worse, as a “necessary evil” akin to an HR dept. Too many IT Departments that I have seen view THEMSELVES as unnecessary… or at least they ACT that way. Then they commit the even greater sins of information witholding and power grabbing.
In the larger scheme of thing I have to agree with Cochrane though, in that on a global scale, the helpdesk/maintenance aspects of IT will vanish over time. Shedding the Windows monoculture would get us all there even faster.
–chuck
Comment by cgoolsbee — June 11, 2007 @ 3:00 pm
Yes, I agree..there will be IT departments but, reduced staff. Most of the products and work independently. Why pay a staff to work with various software when they still have to contact the vendor. like the security analyst positions…dead and gone.
May IT and it connection sound it rest in peace
Comment by jill dasilva — June 12, 2007 @ 12:19 pm
Sounds like a novel concept when your IT department has been outsourced and the cost of service is based off of call resolution.
The problem with any leader viewing IT as a cost center is that they have not yet defined their team. IT is a business enabling force! If a CEO or other corporate leader understands their corporate mission and they understand their key players in that mission then there will not be any room for “do-it-yourselves” within their team.
I agree with the first comment that companies that use “IT STRATEGICALLY” will always have an IT department. When their mission statement is clear and the teams defined IT is truly a business enabler.
As for the BP I think that the CEO needs to address if he has the right teammate. To me the person making the $4k decision doesn’t have the right seat on the bus.
Comment by Shawn Folkman — June 12, 2007 @ 1:48 pm
Hogwash, where do I start!
This is another prophecy like ‘the mainframe is obsolete’ that Gartner likes to spew without any basis in reality. Guess what, almost 20 years later the Mainframe is still here, still used by most all of the largest companies, getting faster and faster all the time and there is no reasonable way for most to get rid of them yet. What we do have now is Distributed Computing with inefficient, unrealistic DR plans (if they have plans), rampant illegal installation of software, overly available data (in other words insecure), out of control software levels/patches, costs going through the roof for staff to support all those servers, electricity, cooling and on and on.
Comparing IT to the typing pool is ludicrous. Lets see, relatively unskilled typists (yes skilled in hitting the right keys but not exactly an educated function) compared to highly trained IT professionals (and if you are not comparing to highly trained, then that’s your problem). Guess what happened to the typing pool, it wasn’t self reliance as claimed, it was the word processor. It’s not that the average employee can necessarily type any faster now than 40+ years ago, but with the ability to backspace and fix errors, spell checking, grammar checking etc. it reduced the value of the 60-90+ words per minute without errors typist. The requestor could do it on a word processor themselves and the cost came back by eliminating the wait time (a necessity in our instant world), eliminate the communication (after all they had to write it in draft to give it to the typist anyway) and improved the product by being able to make tweaks on the fly. Technology was the key. How again do they explain that technology is going to eliminate the technology expert? Now regarding the bank teller analogy, again, replaced by the ATM (Automatic Teller Machine). What makes it Automatic, Technology!
The IT department will likely change as do most but will remain necessary for any foreseeable future. I am not sure about the rest of you but go run virus scans, spyware scans etc. on those computers supported by your kids, good luck with them for real production support. Furthermore, there is no economic sense in having lesser knowledgeable, lesser trained people outside of IT spend their valuable time working on the company’s computers. Most companies foolish enough to try this will spend more money paying end users to fumble than it cost to have an IT guy/gal do it in the first place but you won’t know it because the cost will be buried in the wrong budget. Yes for simple easy stuff they may be able to do it but what about security, compliance, disaster recovery etc. These are not skills or experiences that your kids have or that the typical end users should have to worry about. And finally, do we really expect Jane over in accounting to go remote control the server with her Oracle DB on it, install the patches, go to the SAN, configure some volumes for her new DB, write the schema, whip out a quick VB program to load the DB and then go back and finish the companies books, yeah, RIGHT! The best you will get is Accounting going out and hiring their own IT people and hiding the IT expense making it even harder to figure out what costs what.
Gartner once before (or more) promised this self reliance with the claim of the demise of the mainframe (’distribute’ everything and let the departments run their servers). How well has that worked folks? Now what is the current trend for distributed servers? The way it looks from my desk, it is consolidation. First put them all under IT’s control and now merge them onto fewer machines. Guess what, new mainframes are still being deployed too, they just say ‘HP’ or ‘SUN’ or ‘Dell’ on them instead of IBM. Is ANYONE still trying any of this ‘distributed’ computer management without an IT department?
I won’t even go into the ‘offshore’ everything, oh wait, pay us to tell you what to offshore insanity that Gartner has tried to push. I think we need a new rumor, Gartner doesn’t know what the #&!! They are talking about (oh, wait, that wouldn’t be a rumor now would it!). Why do you journalists keep repeating the babble from Gartner. How about this headline, ‘Gartner loses track of reality but grapples to stay in business with ridiculous claims!’. And you’re just a gulty repeating it as they were writing it.
Comment by Greg — June 12, 2007 @ 3:36 pm
This comment, doesn’t make too much sense to me. Talking from the engineering perspective, the duties that a teenage can cover are those to a help desk. To be productive in IT the engineer needs to have knowledge of mathematics to understand networking master several script languages which are used to run tools and programs in both UNIX and Microsoft Environments. Knowledge is not everything, that person needs to have troubleshooting skills. These are skills one can only be developed with experience. The most important ability an IT team member must have is the ability to adapt and learn quickly in an environment that chances constantly. I am not a business analyst and cannot give an opinion on the business model that justifies the use of an IT Team on a medium and large infrastructure. As a Software Developer I find myself depending on Greg. He is our IT guy. I could do most of the things he does myself. If I would have to worry about his job though I would be a lot less productivity in developing code. During software development the IT team is charge with the product of a company. In the business like myspace or facebook, the IT manages the accounts, the spam filtering, server and network traffic I can’t see how user will be able to manage these them selfs. Mathematically it is impossible to write cod for a machine to do the work.
Comment by Erion — June 12, 2007 @ 4:34 pm
Well if IT is mistaken with HelpDesk this is oviously a good option but is not so. IT is not helpdesk and is much more than printing menu and file copy. Of course with time personnel is more informed and qualified with information systems and this brings them more with the need for techonology but makes them no technicians. Technology is not a phone call!
Comment by Arjan Alite — June 12, 2007 @ 4:36 pm
OK, if we assume that using technology for the bussines is the same that publishing videos in “you tube”, this is the right direction. Perhaps it happens but not in the same way that with typing pools. Perhaps IT departament become closer to bussines unit to work together and not like the “intelligent guys” that say what is good and what is bad using only the technology point of view…, perhaps will be, but not tomorrow, when the technology won’t function properly, who look inside the Box to find the problem and make the fix ?.
I think you are talking about IT-fiction….
Comment by Luis ALcibar — June 13, 2007 @ 2:37 am
Were there is a real shift in the provision of IT department services it is from outsourcing and subsequently to off-shoring. The simple driving factor is that of cost. Another factor working against maintaining internal IT departments is the pace of technological advancement, most hardware is self healing through virtualisation, diverse routing, data replication. Now consider thin client services, how hard is it to swap out the workstation and restore the build while the service provider provides all of the above?
Technoloigical advancement offers growth through efficiency and cost effectiveness, if there is a saving to be made then it will be made! Yes, without a doubt the children of today are indeed the IT department of the home, and they know IT.
Comment by M S — June 13, 2007 @ 2:38 am
[…] On a more extreme note, I recently wrote about an analyst who said IT department jobs may one day be obsolete because users are becoming more self-reliant. […]
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