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Is Web 2.0 A Bigger Threat Than Outsourcing?

Posted by Zonk on from the need-to-change-the-shirt dept.

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."

3 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. Shifting of costs by cerberusss · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.
    --
    8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
  2. Good for users, bad for security? by Bearhouse · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  3. Re:Automation is always a threat by Qhue · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.