Is Web 2.0 A Bigger Threat Than Outsourcing?

An anonymous reader writes "According to InformationWeek, Web 2.0 is even worse than outsourcing for IT jobs. The article talks about corporations that have laid off IT staff and replaced them with technologies like mashups and wikis that can help people get things done without involving IT. Most IT people still think Web 2.0 is an overhyped buzzword, but that might not matter: So many Web 2.0 apps are sold (or given away for free) by software-as-a-service companies like Google that people can bypass IT altogether, and IT might not even know until it's too late."

Comments

Shifting of costs

[cerberusss]

FTFA:

"We've cut IT staff by 20%, and we're providing a whole lot more in terms of IT services," says Ken Harris, CIO at nutritional products manufacturer Shaklee. Harris started with a mashup platform from StrikeIron; [...] Now, Shaklee gets its ERP from Workday and search from Visual Sciences

Right, so he doesn't pay his own staff but instead pays staff at StrikeIron, Workday and Visual Sciences.

Bottomline: this is about a CIO who recently got hired and wants to put his stamp on his new department.

Code

[ilovegeorgebush]

At least the quality of code produced in Web 2.0 has the chance of being better quality. Some of the stuff I work with here as a contractor defies all basic programming logic and structure, which was developed by an Indian outsourcing company. SaaS and Web 2.0 may be a buzzwords, but they're good quality buzzwords.

Good for users, bad for security?

[Bearhouse]

Much-discussed here already. If IT does not respond to user requests, they'll get sidelined. Been happening even since they bought out the first minis, (yes - minis, not micros).

Smart IT bosses anticipate user needs. We need to be saying "hey, have you seen how you could do your job better with this new thing?"... But many don't. So we're seen as a cost centre, rather than a profit centre. A hinderance, rather than an enabler.

Then we get outsourced...or control passes to the users and third parties. The risk is that corporate IT becomes an unstructured mess.

With no central authority, who then looks after the basics, such as corporate standards for storing and sharing information? What about security? Sure, some smart user can download the latest mashup, but will it play well with everything else? What's the upgrade path?

Re:Automation is always a threat

[Qhue]

Poor attitude among IT folk is a much bigger threat than Web2.0 or indeed anything else. In order to guarantee job security our local IT have declared hegemony over all technology and introduced labor-intensive blockades that keep them busy...so busy that any concept of innovation completely passes them by! When everyone walks around with a dangling ring of USB flashdrives because trying to get networked fileshare space is a major hassle and ridiculously expensive ($3k for a 1 gig partition charged to your overhead budget!) and technical leads start forwarding proprietary email to gmail because of 250 meg limits on Outlook then the overall opinion of IT folk is going to collapse.

There's such thing as pointless redundancy

[jollyreaper]

There's some things that you want to do in-house, other things you outsource. This isn't just about IT. Accounting typically uses a payroll company, even smaller companies will do that. Even if there are handymen on staff, cleaning is still likely to be given over to a janitorial service.

When all this web crap was shiny and new, there were no established procedures, technologies, business methodologies, people were making it up as they went. Just consider the corporate website. If there's one functionality that should be universal but generally wasn't, it was the store locator. Just tell me where your goddamn store is! Pretty much every site has it now but there was a time when you couldn't count on it. Also, consider the HR portion of the typical corporate site. Sure, back in the day companies tried to write the scripts in-house but these days it's just as easy to buy the software to do it, either hosted on your server or embedded in an iframe so it looks like your server but is handled by a third party. You'll see this on restaurant websites where they have gift card programs, the only thing the restaurant's web guy has to do is drop in the link for the iframe and he's done.

The very very first web job I ever had was at a dot.bomb where the CTO did not know what server-side scripting was and thought that ASP would bog down the website too much. What was the upshot of that? A site indexing travel videos, all built by hand, every page static. They didn't even use HTML templates to replicate design changes across the site, all edits were made manually, either in notepad or Frontpage 98. Yes, the sound you hear is heads thunking desks in disbelief.

That was all incredibly stupid busywork. But I've seen that same level of stupidity in departments other than IT, overstaffed due to inefficient business practices. I hate hate HATE layoffs but I also feel that one of the biggest steps to avoiding them is not hiring too many people in the first place. I'd rather be understaffed and working hard than overstaffed and waiting for the guillotine to fall.

Getting back to the web stuff, it's silly to have to contact a web designer every time you want to change something on a website. Yes, major design changes will have to be done by a professional. But if you're talking about information that can be templatized and handled through web forms like job postings, company news, etc, then you really can let the secretary edit the site. I've seen some horrible tools for this where an understanding of html for formatting was required. The newer WYSIWIG interfaces make formatting as easy as any word processor. IT guys can set it up and move on to better challenges, they don't have to dick around with this sort of thing any longer.

Re:Mashups?

[morgan_greywolf]

I've lost count of how many times I hear that IT workers or programmers will be obsolete because of new technology. Yeah. In the 1980s they said 4GLs were supposed to replace programmers. Yet, here we are in 2007 and tcompanies still hire programmers. A few years ago they were talking about how blade servers, self-healing operating systems and automated processes were going to replace systems administrator. Strange how there are still systems administrators.

Evolution Of the IT Market

[broward]

I posted this in Sept, 2006, although I floated the concept a year before at Defcon, and originally when I was an instructor at ITT in 1997.

http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?entry=evolution_of_the_it_market

"The IT Market can be considered, in gestalt, as being an S-curve market with the year 2000-2001 ( the Dot Com Crash ) as its inflection point...

"But in the post-Crash world, profit margins on mass-produced products have fallen. Niche markets with high profit margins are sought after, but many companies still upgrade legacy products for decreasing profit margins (Oracle, Microsoft come to mind). The IT market is still in a slow-motion shakeout period, but I suspect that few IT workers believe it"

Re:Automation is always a threat

[guruevi]

Never worked in big corps that charge between departments? I am an IT department of a department of a larger entity that also has an IT department that provides us with our network.

Last week they had to install 2 network drops. Just 2* CAT6 going from the network closet on the first floor to the network closet on the second floor, there are 10ths of cables already running so all they need to do is feed it. They were busy with 2 people not even 1 hour and then somebody came afterwards to reconfigure switches and document the change for about 1 hour, they used maybe 50 feet of cable. They charged our department more than USD 700 (I'm not kidding). According to my calculations (if the cable was overpriced at $100 (copper, not fiber) those people are making each $200/hour. I can hire a consultant a whole day to install my cables and be out cheaper.

Re:Thank God

[nine-times]

Seriously, though, I've never met a decent IT pro who wouldn't welcome being made *a little* obsolete. I think we all generally understand that a lot of the stuff in our jobs could be easier, should be easier, and we'd prefer it if we didn't have to deal with that stuff. Most IT pros, or the good ones anyway, are people who really like for things to work "the right way". We get a kick out of slick solutions that actually work, especially when it makes our jobs easier.

Will it put me out of work? Somehow I'm not worried. Most likely, whatever the solutions are, there will still need to be someone implementing the solution. If humanity actually managed to make computer systems so powerful and intuitive that IT people were absolutely unnecessary, it'd be worth giving up my current career to live in that world-- but I don't see it coming anytime soon.

Re:Automation is always a threat

[Maxo-Texas]

And you would be like the yahoos at my company that were shocked when their "cost savings" resulted in 3 days of complete outage at the new cheaper "rehosting" site at IBM. Being executives, they papered over the complete collapse, loss of customers, loss of business, massive amounts of unscheduled over time by a dozen people, and loss of a couple quality people after that fiasco which resulted in several major projects being canceled since there were no longer resources (even offshore/infosys) resources that could do the work.

SOX and the control procedures businesses implement (30 days to do what used to take us 7 days) drive IT costs up. Their solution here? Enforce the procedures on what remains of IT while farming the work out to contractors who have no procedures and install live to production without any controls of any kind... but it's okay because they are not company employees they are not covered by the control procedures.

Of course there is no documentation... and the way they get things running can't be duplicated.

Re:Automation is always a threat

[pokerdad]

He was describing interdepartmental charges (i.e. corporate "funny money").

Which is why I tend to agree that his IT department is innocent; any time I have worked in a big company and had knowledge of interdepartmental charges, they have been obscene and had little basis in reality.

Just an example from one job I worked at - the head of security requested that they get a small filing cabinet to put beside the security desk. They were told that there was no problem approving the purchase, but to rent the space it would have to sit in would cost more than security's total budget.

Re:Automation is always a threat

[Maxo-Texas]

I do not know what our cost / gb is.

I do know we are limited to 100mb of mail storage! (which runs out if someone sends you a few emails with pictures). Insane when hotmail and google have 5gb each.

You make the rest sound so easy, that I really doubt you've ever worked for a truly large corporation.

At my current corporation, required procedures have lowered our productivity by 75% since 2002. When I started here in 2000, we were about 1/20th as productive as I had been for 15 years at a tiny company. A "2 hour" change my tiny company (say 10 lines of code, testing and put it into production) took about 40 hours. Now a "2 hour" change takes between 27 and 46 *days* after it is approved which takes 7 to 14 days.

People who work here say Exxon was and is much worse and we have a ways to go before we get as bad as they are there.