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Why I.T. Matters
Anonymous Coward writes "Technology Review has an interesting story from the inventor of the Ethernet refuting the claim that IT has lost its strategic value." Our earlier story summarizes the original claim: that there's little to be gained by staying at the forefront of technology.
I believe Cisco (aka the Bandwidth Growers Association) likens enterprise IT fabric to oxygen -- its just something you must have to keep the business running. Like oxygen, IT is now taken from granted.
For myself and my wife, we could not do what we do or earn what we earn without the Internet or our Macs.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
My boss is a non-techie managerial type. (This is scary, as I work for a Web site.) She told me, to my face, within a week of starting work there, that "the dot-com bust was the fault of you techies." She makes no bones about the fact that she hates techies, and blames them for people like her losing lots of money during the dot-bomb.
The problem is the incredibly facile mindset of the typical manager. All they think about is profit. As a result, they think of trends, technologies, even people as "a good way to make me money" or "not a good way to make me money." That's about all they see in anything; it's a sort of managerial binary.
For a period, during the dot-com era, computer geeks like us lived like rock stars, because the Powers That Be in the business world had become convinced that "geeks are human money machines"-- that "IT" (let's face it, "IT" is just a corporate way of saying "computers and computer geeks, as they relate to business") existed to help fill their coffers, and that a computer-- by definition!-- was a machine to make rich people richer.
Then came the dot-bomb, and now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction (as it always does, humanity being what it is). Medium-sized businesses hire one or two techies, who are inevitably terribly overworked, to manage their entire "IT infrastructure" (read: anything involving digital technology, which means computers, network cables, routers, hubs, switches, "smart phones", PBX systems, Palm Pilots, Game Boys...) company-wide. Geeks are seen almost as traitors-- since we "failed" to make the rich folks richer. (Of course, it was their silly notion that geeks would make them rich in the first place-- but, of course, part of the mindset of a manager is to never blame themselves...) As a result, companies are under-hiring in terms of number of geeks per end-user, and to some extent under-buying in terms of computer expenditures per seat. Plain and simple, computers are seen as "something that won't make us money".
I've been saying (perhaps a bit too optimistically) for years that eventually, hopefully, some smart businesspeople (oxymoron?) will figure out that the IT budget, like everything else, works best in moderation-- that is, neither hiring geeks by the dozen because "they'll make us the next amazon.com" nor laying off all but one geek since "they failed us!". Hopefully, this will happen some day... but I won't hold my breath.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
In the early stage of its development, every technology provides profits to those who have it because it makes a differece to those who have not. But you need an investiment and that particular technology may not last long enough to compenstate the investiment. So the question at this stage is if the investiment can be justified against the risk. Naturally, there is no clear answer to the question.
Unless you have monopoly on it, eventually the technology becomes ubiquitous and you can no longer expect a gain by making the difference. But at this stage, the technology is a must. So you need to have it regardless you like it or not. So the question at this point is how to maintain the technology with a minimal cost.
The so-called IT involves various different technologies. Some are in their early stage, and some in the ubiquitous state. So it is wrong to make a disucussion using such the broad concept term. Some of IT matter, some of IT do not.
Today being an IT expert means that you know Java, can hack HTML and do bullet-point presentations for your managers.
/. poster who responded to the article reporting a lower enrollment in Computer Science by saying, "Good, now the people who actually care about Computer Science will be the only ones who get degrees." Computer Science, like Business School, was, in the last 5 years, too often the place you'd find money-hungry asslickers who don't care about anything (i.e. have no passions but the green).
Wow, you don't really get it, do you? It's precisely this kind of thinking that has allowed IT to be outsourced. The thinking that anyone who knows Java and can write HTML is good enough to be an IT worker.
If you had actually read my father's response, rather than skimming it and getting angry that it criticizes the Managerial Class (of which I assume you are either a part, or at least aspite to be a part), you'd realize that he has a much higher standard for what an IT worker should be than you do. Yea, the job market is saturated with "supposed" IT workers, but that doesn't mean it's bad for people who actually know what they're doing. Incompetent people used to be able to get well-paying jobs by just knowing Java. Now you have to prove that you are smarter than that. A lot of supposed IT workers just have money signs in their eyes. I think outsourcing is a bad idea, but I also know that the people who will suffer most from it are the people who don't deserve IT jobs in the first place.
I tend to agree with another
IT workers are not "I know Java and HTML" morons. Real IT workers are people who can integrate computer systems and make a business run smoother. The truth is, real IT workers should be able to design and implement the systems from scratch, but should know when not to in order to save the business time and money.
I find it easy to blame even your assertion on management. Managers hire IT workers. But because the managerial class is not defined by competence, managers don't know the criteria on which to evaluate IT workers. So they hire morons. Morons fill the IT ranks, and suddenly IT gets redefined by people like you as "knowing Java and 'hacking' HTML." The smart IT workers become irrelevant in manager's eyes, because they don't know hot recognize IT workers as "smart."
So yea, blaming management sounds about right to me, actually. Even for this.
(Disclosure: Personally, I don't plan to go into IT, at least not permanently, though I am pursuing a computer science degree...)
....what *is* the Next Big Thing?
Table-ized A.I.
Oh yes people do choose a shipping company based on their IT advantages. The features available for managing 20 people routinely sending FedEx shipments, each with their own billing codes, address books, tracking number lookups etc. are very important. We've recently added an admin account and 50 user accounts to our FedEx account. If they couldn't provide a way for managing all this activity we'd find an overnight provider who can.
We're an ad agency, naturally we're weird, but we can't be the only industry who looks to IT solutions to make our lives easier.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951