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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."
Bottomline: this is about a CIO who recently got hired and wants to put his stamp on his new department.
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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?
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 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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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"