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Nick was misquoted as saying IT is dead, and requoted in Slashdot no less. Hard to deal with all that traffic, but it gives him a chance to provide useful summary of his thinking, which is always worth studying.
“If we look at the end game – a decade or two down the road for big companies; sooner for smaller ones – it’s hard to imagine that the “IT department” as we’ve come to know it will still exist. Many of the information-management and process-design skills currently housed in IT departments will continue to be of great value to companies, of course, but they will likely have been absorbed into business units and other departments instead of being isolated in a technically focused corporate function. Many of the purely technical jobs will have shifted from the users to the suppliers or been automated out of existence.” – IT’s alive!
A decade or two is a comfortable margin to contemplate career change perhaps, but from the enterprise perspective this is merely a realistic timescale to make the right investments in development, and possibly an irreversible one to make the wrong choices.
As James Cherkoff has illustrated recently about corporate decision making, shifting from asking Why? to asking How? is a huge step in itself.
“As many of you will know (all too well!) corporations and large organisations move at a glacial place – and for good reason. They are legal entities with sophisticated stakeholder groups, often tightly regulated and executives whose decisions can result in major investment. So the move from Why? to How? is a major step forward.” – IT as Enterprise Change Agent
Dan Morril over at ITToolbox has been studying Carr’s viewpoint, and agrees with much. Particularly as recession and workforce attrition come to the forefront of attention, the advantages of cloud computing become compelling even against the rearguard arguments over security.
“as the economy slows, people lost to layoffs will more likely than not move on, meaning no replacements in the pipeline as the economy improves in 3 to 4 years from now. The only real choice might be to leverage the cloud computing structure and rely on bigger companies infosec departments.” – Information Security is Dead, Long Live Information Security
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