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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."
It doesn't matter what the industry is. Automation is always a "threat" to jobs. But, people still work in the auto industry, and people still work in IT. You can look at automation two ways. You can view it as a threat to yourself, and you will be one of the poor-attitude IT workers that get laid off. Or, you can look at automation as a tool to let you get more done, and you will be one of the self-motivated go-getters that can be a VP of Technology since you don't have to bother yourself with peon work anymore.
Bottomline: this is about a CIO who recently got hired and wants to put his stamp on his new department.
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You mean other staff can start writing their own documents, wikis, etc and don't need me to re-install Microsoft Office three times a year? Thank God!
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?
Until a web 2.0 app can replace a burned out motherboard, I will not worry about it too much.
The sky is falling indeed Chicken Little....
You say you want a revolution....
The purpose of IT - indeed any technology - is to improve the efficiency of business process so that more things can be achieved, more accurately, by less people.
Throwing your hands up and saying that improvements in IT are costing IT jobs is about as pointless as complaining that tractors and combine harvesters mean there's a relative lack of shovelling jobs available in agriculture these days.
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
In my experience, while there are IT departments (or individuals within IT departments) that give excellent service, there are also the control-freaks who think it is their job to decide what their users' requirements should be.
Anyone would think from the quotation above that the primary purpose of an IT department is its self-perpetuation.
A story I remember about technology:
Two men are standing beside the road watching the new backhoe dig a hole. "Look at that. Think of how many men with shovels could be working if we didn't have that thing," says the older man. "Think of how many men with spoons could be working if we didn't have the shovel," said the other.
If a problem is simple enough that it can be replaced by an automated system, then solve it and give me a more interesting problem to work on.
Exactly how are "mashups" a technology?
In the sense that some companies, Microsoft included are *desperate* for them to be a launch pad into future profits. Cut out the middle man, go direct to the customer. Its a dream that is unlikely to succeed.
I've lost count of how many times I hear that IT workers or programmers will be obsolete because of new technology. It just aint so. Even if the average user can knock something together to do a job they want, they first have to want to do that.
Same goes for network and system maintenance, many people could do the job themselves with a little training, but don't see why they should. After all, if your business is selling non computer related products, you don't want to be bothered spending time doing anything but that at work, or you lose money and customers.
IT people/web designers and programmers get hired because people do not want to do those jobs themselves.
Hell I've been a programmer for 8 years, and I don't like fixing my own pc when it breaks, that's not something I want to bother with. I have people who are paid to do that for me. That might make me a bit odd, but to be honest I'm an algorithm designer, hardware, so long as its fast and working, really doesn't interest me.
If your job could be replaced by a wiki, it wasnt *really* an IT job to begin with.
Sometimes I almost can't believe what is considered an "IT Job" these days. I've been in the IT industry for about 10 years. When I started if you were in the IT dept it meant that you knew the in's-and-out's of the most popular technologies, most importantly the workstation OS's that companies used.
These days so many of "IT Jobs" are just administrative positions which require more spreadsheet skills than they can find at the local temp agency.
No! You don't understand: Web 2.0 will synergise key technologies into a mashup Wiki that will enable customers to drive their own solutions and manage SOA n-tier applications without any requirement at all for infastructure, oversight, management or maintainance! Using AJAX will save you 110% each quarter on IT spending. It will make you coffee, fetch you donuts and give you a blowjob! Web 2.0 is here to save the universe! Everyone get connected!
If you think that's neat just you wait for the symantic web on handheld supercomputers. I hear that will be ready only 15 years from now!
Gigantic robotic arms with huge potato mashers. Once every year they set them loose around the office down here, and everyone screams and runs. The survivors get a raise, the widows of those who didn't make it get a ham. Best teambuilding event ever, especially when you're screaming "Every man for himself!" at the top of your lungs while avoiding the masher.
Until said provider goes tits up or even better, sells your data to someone else...
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
Every day I deal with people representing businesses who are so bad at their jobs of dealing with other people that they seem to want to be replaced by a machine. How many times do I have to tell one of these droids the equivalent of "wake up and pay attention", or "no, it's not in your script", when I discover they can barely even hear the words that aren't precisely what they were trained to hear in the transaction?
And it's not just me: I wait in long lines, an audience for the customer abuse or indifference that they serve to each customer indiscriminately.
These people don't care about their jobs. They don't have even the basic human social compassion with their customers to treat us differently than they treat the objects where they work. They're liable to treat the boxes of products better, because damaging those can dock their pay. Why should I care about them? To the degree that I do, I want them replaced by a machine that can do their job without bothering them. Even when the machines do a crappy job, at least they reduce the prices, and lower expectations.
Lots of people should be replaced by machines. Freeing them to work on their people skills, so they're worth paying more than the electric bill.
--
make install -not war
if television is a threat to radio
or if automobiles are a threat to the locomotive industry
well, duh
if it's a better way to do things, that's progress. get over it and move on
for a site which regularly bashes music, television, and movie execs for not seeing progress in digital content and fighting it with stupid legal maneuvers, this certainly is a case of utter hypocrisy here on slashdot
oh, and btw, what i just said applies to outsourcing too: if some guy can do what you do in india for half your salary, well then suck it up, shut up, and move on. and i say that as someone who works in IT
i hate people with a sense of entitlement. no, you are not entitled to absolute security in your job, sorry, not yours. life changes. deal with it, retrain, move on, get a better job. most of those who in fact do complain are dead weight who can't adapt to begin with. whining about entitlement is all they have for them, not real computer science skill. it's a suckers game in the end
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So it's just like outsourcing then.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Agreed.
There is no "natural economy" favoring the IT guys. I've worked as one, and I know full well the combination of poor social skills combined with high self-regard for their own intelligence/expertise that leads to an arrogant "priesthood" mentality. Additionally, because of their responsibilty for the critical data plumbing of a modern business, the fear of being responsible for failure of what are, frankly, often fragile systems causes a bunker mentality. Their customers, namely the rest of the organization, is viewed as a threat - because anything they do could trigger failure. I've often felt that in many IT groups, the preferred infrastructure for the non-IT personnel would be un unplugged PC in a locked room. In these types of groups, the organization will eventually seize any viable alternative to eliminate the IT group. After all, they are usually relatively expensive staff.
Successful IT organizations know that they are purely a service business. The most important attributes are responsiveness and reliability. If these are not present, they will not survive.
It's a pretty basic cycle:
a) A particular skill becomes a dominant part of mankind's livelihood (hunting, agriculture, tradework, computers.)
b) We teach all of our children the basic aspects of these skills in order to increase efficiency.
c) The children grow up and begin working on the major problems and issues within these skills.
d) Through technology and ingenuity, we slowly automate, simplify, and streamline those skills.
e) A new skill arises to replace the now-streamlined and unskilled skill.
f) Repeat.
And since all the kids coming out of high school and college now have a pretty thorough end-user understanding of computers (including the big 3: office suites, the Internet, and cell phones), a lot of IT tasks have just been rolled into the non-IT positions of a company. Remember when the CEO had to have his own IT guy just to work a spreadsheet or open a database? We've come a long way.
And ultimately part of mankind's ambition has to be to reach a point in our technology and civilization where machines and automata do most of our work - even complex things. And that's the way we like it, natch.
The provider does not even has to sell it. Don't forget that we are in the golden leak-age.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
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"
If producing a good or service requires less input--fewer man hours, less energy, less raw materials--that's a good thing; and our free market economy is supposed to achieve exactly that.
In a few years, many small and medium sized businesses will probably be able to get by without IT staff altogether; they'll be using mostly web-based services and outsourced remote management.
Of course, this means that a lot of IT people will need to find new jobs. So what? IT itself eliminated many jobs: typists, secretaries, customer service, filing clerks, mail handlers, etc. IT professionals really have even less business complaining about this than other professions.
Oh to find a Luddite article on the front page of Slashdot.
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Lets explore some other tragic job stealing moments in history:
the invention of the wheel - stole jobs from the carriers
the invention of the computer - stole jobs from the abacus users
the invention of Web 2.0 - stole jobs from IT
Seriously, our job as technologists is to make things more efficient. Efficiency inevitably means less resources are used. Using less resources inevitably leads to less need for manpower.
Efficiency is not to be feared. If you think about it, your life is better because of efficiency, think of what your life would be like without job killing efficient technology.
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
I have worked at a Fortune 500 company for almost five years. A few things I have observed there:
1. Most businesses larger than, say, fifty employees are going to have very complex problems -- problems that only dedicated IT personnel can solve. I fail to see how any outsourced "mashup" (whatever that *really* is) could tailor itself adequately to these problems. It's just a restatement of the common problem of customizing third-party vertical software for a specific business. In my experience, that endeavor tends to faily miserably, draining productivity as users are forced by the software into a non-intuitive mode. Eventually, the offending system is removed and replaced with something else. You need IT personnel for all of this.
2. In a large IT group, there are a lot of people who don't contribute value. You have your sycophants, ass-kissers, hiring mistakes, misassigned resources, bumbling managers, etc. The problem is that the corporate culture can make it very hard to get rid of these people. They may have influence with the powers that be, or they may even *be* the powers. If you see some downsizing, you have to ask *who* got downsized. Perhaps it wasn't the people actually adding value.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
When a member of your IT staff does it, you can fire or even prosecute them, and unless they're really malicious and destroy or poison the data and back ups, you still have the original data.
When an outsourced IT company does it:
a) it may not be illegal in their country of origin
b) it may not be covered in the contract you have with them
c) even if it is, it may not be covered in whatever deal is made if they're bought out
d) there may be no mechanism for (easily) recovering your data in the event of terminating service
e) if they go tits up there may be no way at all to recover your data
It's not a question of whether or not trusting mission-critical data or services to a third party is a risk, it's a question of whether it's a sensible or necessary risk to take.
It's official. Most of you are morons.