Slashdot Mirror
Is the IT Department Dead?
alphadogg writes "The IT department is dead, and it is a shift to utility computing that will kill this corporate career path. So predicts Nicholas Carr in his new book launched Monday, "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google." Carr is best known for a provocative Harvard Business Review article entitled "Does IT Matter?" Published in 2003, the article asserted that IT investments didn't provide companies with strategic advantages because when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same."
If you work with PCI data then you can't outsource anything with PCI data in it, nor can you host your infrastructure on a shared system. So that market still requires you to be isolated rather than farming out to some bigger company. Just my $0.02
Could be. Nobody's moved down there for weeks and the stink is awful.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Utility computing means that computers will run themselves. Your LAN will wire itself, hardware will never fail, no one will ever need to make any changes to the configuration (which configured itself to begin with) and new terminals will magically materialise on peoples desk overnight, whenever one is needed. Users will never have any trouble what so ever and will never need to ask questions. Bugs will be eliminated.
Next question.
If you'd just do what we tell you and quit yer gripin' everything would be chocolate sprinkles and rainbows! -AC
how will idiots make money with computers?
j/k thx it. have a fish.
Its tired and shagged ouyt after a long squawk
and pining for the fjords.
Now that all dairies use it, pasteurization doesn't give any dairy an advantage over any other. Clearly, pasteurization is dead.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
All of us down here in IT are alive and kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know.
I'd like to see google services fix the computer that "Joe in accounting" just "updated"
seriously though... There is something to be said for physical presence. I can remote control computers, yes, but when the network connection isn't working, I have to physically get my hands on it. "just ship it out"... 9 times out of 10, it's a silly setting that an even sillier user changed, that they shouldn't have
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
your heard it here first!
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Who is gonna clean the wheel of the mouse? Oh, it is optical now!!!
As long as IT is considered a mystic black-art that anybody who 'knows-computers' can do then it will never receive the respect that it deserves. All IT jobs should be considered on the same "Skilled Trade" tier as plumbers, welders, electricians, etc. As long as the PHB thinks that his son Johnny has a computer so anybody can do this job, then it will always be a dead-end position.
There should be a registered apprenticeship, and it should take years to finish. The Certification schools should all be closed down and only true colleges and universities be registered to offer the courses.
If any boss thinks that you could be replaced by a student for $10.00/hr, then there is no respect.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I take issue with the claim that investments in IT do not create a strategic advantage because when one company starts using a new technology, so will its competitors. Isn't the same true of, oh, business strategies? Humans are, after all, primates-- and, as they say, "monkey see, monkey do". Anyone who hasn't noticed that large companies tend to emulate each others' strategies isn't paying much attention. So is the C[EIF]O career path dead too? How about the janitorial career path? After all, every company's janitor cleans shit stains out of the toilet in the same exact ways... so should companies stop investing in janitors?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
They predicted the death of the IT department twenty years ago when the PC became widespread. It didn't happen, and it won't now.
Back then it actually looked like it might. Now it doesn't. Who's going to replace that hardware router when it fails? Upgrade the equipment?
Perhaps the "IT department" will become for most companies what the post office is to the mail department; i.e. hired out to a specialty firm. But that hardly matters to the geeks in the IT department, they'll still get their paychecks. Their checks will just have a different company's name on them, that's all.
Good luck offshoring hardware replacement, or doing more than a script-based "help" desk.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
"Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people." Sure, Users are really likely to be picking up those skills themselves real soon. It will happen the same day they all remember ctrl-c is copy, and ctrl-v is paste. I won't hang up my pocket protector anytime soon.
Engineering didn't matter, because, hell.. Once one person started using the wheel, everyone did, so what was the advantage in anyone having it?
Though really, it's more like the public transport system. By rights, it should be cheaper and more efficient if everyone used the mass transit system, and we all hopped on busses and trains run by large commercial entities with a monopoly on all transport.
Reality, on the other hand doesn't quite work that way. There are a lot of places that will simply want their own stuff (hey, you control your building and your servers a lot more closely than putting them in a big datacenter, and hey.. What about when your building loses external network connections?).
The world is a diverse place with a lot of different cases. And any company that trusts their lifeblood to another (storing in one datacenter) trusts a little more than they really should.
The IT department, even in the world of datacenters, will still be there. Same as facilities departments, same as every other department, just the role may shift a little.
The IT Career path is a mis-nomer, more like a dead end.
Do you like pulling cable? Reinstalling Windows? Lugging hardware around? Crawling under desks?
If you do that for 5-10 years, you eventually move up to a glorified number cruncher, or putting together some 'mashup' that hopefully somebody will use.
IT has long since been dead, it's now just starting to stink.
First, outsourcing IT is a bad idea. First, there's always something you don't and shouldn't trust to someone else. Data security can only be 100 percent assured if you know where it is. Storing data in Google's cloud and only relying on it is a recipe for disaster.
Gorkman
Nothing to see here... move along.
Just outsourcing with a different name, and instead to India, its to some random ASP.
This idea of utility computing fails to take in account of one thing: Security. Thanks to laws like SOX, HIPAA, and others, it can be considered breaching "due diligence" if a company outsources their IT to some "CPU warehouse", and the data gets breached.
Some things can be moved outside a company similar to power or utilities. IT and computing resources is not one of these items that can be passed to a utility company any more than a utility company providing office space or file cabinets.
Not in IT..., the notion that if you adopt a competitive advantage in terms of a technology, others will too is a universal. So, in the 2003 article, am I to understand that this guy suggested essentially that no one should do R&D because others will benefit from it eventually? Strange... why should anyone believe this guy now?
So Toyota should do away with its R&D division because anything they innovate will simply be copied by Honda, GM, and VW?
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
... in Hyderabad.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
So IT in corporate America is going to be run completely by external companies, which I would assume are the companies that provide the hardware to us, according to this author.
I consider this flawed in two ways:
1. IT services are not dead: Even if no IT department existed, some company, person or entity will have to be responsible for upkeeping the hardware and software implemented, as well as ensuring that the network components and business computers are all functioning properly. You could change the name, slice and dice it a thousand ways, but in the end, the premise is the same: managaing the spread of information in an environment, which from what I understand is information technology.
2. IT departments are not dead: If businesses knew that outsourcing services to other companies were cheaper, this would have happened a long time ago. Not like the IT department people wouldn't have jobs; they would just be working for the companies supported by the corporations. So far as I know, it is by far less expensive to maintain an in-house staff that takes care of all of that then pay three-digit-per-hour services to do the same job, and not have adequate knowledge of the business network.
I am pretty new to the corporate aspect of the field, so I might be missing something that this author saw that prompted him to write his diatribe; if I did, please fill me in.
In fact, I feel much better... I think I'll go for a walk now...
As long as there is a PEBKAC there will be a need for IT and I don't believe the users will get any better anytime soon...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Vendors continue to make proprietary software and firmware that refuse to work with competing and complimentary vendor products (and that will be forever), so I think it's safe to say IT shops will be around a very long time.
I think the book's author missed a step in his logic. The centralization of power utilities didn't obsolete electricians. IT departments will become more like electricians, helping companies deal with localized problems and building local infrastructure. Application service providers will not take over all datacenter functions, and as long as end users are proud of their technological ignorance, local support will be absolutely necessary. Now, this may mean opportunities for more independent service providers and a new round of technological entrepreneurialism, but not the death of the IT professional.
I didn't read the whole article but I didn't think I had to after the first page. The companies I have worked for would never outsource the IT department or the data center. They would feel they would lose control over it. Also IT will always be around, 90% of end users don't want to fix anything they just want to call someone and have them do it for them.
From the sounds of it, this author pays his bills by coming up with sensational, baseless titles. I'm going to now write a book declaring the gasoline-powered car DEAD since gas is now $3/gallon. Sure, we still need them and they'll be around for at least another 20 years, but can't you just imagine some hypothetical scenario where people wouldn't drive cars anymore?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
But there are some CEO's and CTO's that will read this, and cut more funding from IT departments, making life even worse for people going into and working in IT. More skilled people will leave, and then with less manpower, more crackers will be breaking into the companies that are stupid enough to listen to this moron, causing more tort lawsuits, more credit card and personal financial profiles will be stolen by russians, thereby causing the total collapse of western civilization as we know it.
Or maybe not.
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
If it was, Marc Andreessen would have struck lucky with not only Netscape but Loudcloud. But he didn't, Loudcloud wasn't successful because corporations are not doing this. I can see how it makes sense to Andreessen and this fellow that this should happen. But corporations do not follow this logic, nor the logic of a Scott Adams or other techies who often puzzle at why corporations do things in a way that appears so peculiar to them. IMHO, it does make sense what corporations are doing, the problem is the Andreessens and Carrs and Adams of the world don't fully understand what the purpose of a corporation is.
The clear answer is no. The reason for this is that in a perfect world, people would be able to pick up multiple proficiencies easily. However, that simply isn't the case in real life - a relatively small amount of people have this trait. Rather than weed out everyone capable of doing a job (say, data entry) because they can't handle even rudimentary IT, it is much more efficient to keep all the people capable of doing a job (data entry in this case), then hire an IT staff. You get all the people capable of data entry doing data entry, and the people capable at IT doing IT, and no one doing a job with rudimentary skill. Plus, you don't have to pay your non-IT staff more for a broader knowledge base.
I love that line about 'corporations used to generate their own electricity, but then the utilities took over'. Yeah right. If the corpation was a big enough consumer of electricity the utility company couldn't generate the amount of power consumed and the company had to generate its own power. Even today U.S. Steel owns and operates electrical production plants and is working to increase the ouput, not decrease it.
If this is his best analogy, I think IT is safe.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
I know one large corporation from the inside that has, more or less, abandoned the IT department: Telecom Italia. Here, IT is considered an "add on" and what's there of IT is tacked on to the departments it is supposed to support, or is outsourced (usually to Acenture).
TI has the worst IT that I have ever seen, by a wide margin. I have never met so many so incompetent fools before. I have never seen such a shoddy network, such crappy software, and such a low quality in general. Run an IT project within TI and you have dozens of consultants running around, most producing work that is so shitty you have to completely rewrite it from scratch before you can use it.
This is a long story put very short, but it's taught me one thing: If you think that IT doesn't matter, that you don't need an IT department, that you can run IT as an afterthought, you will pay threefold for every buck you save in overhead, quality, availability, security and everything else that takes someone who knows what the fuck he's doing to get it done right.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Most corporate IT is composed of two parts Servers/Applications and Networks. Although applications could be restructured to use a centralized model; users still need: switches, routers and access points to connect to those applications. To continue the electric power analogy, just because you buy your power from a utility doesn't mean you won't still need electricians on staff to fix your wiring and junction boxes.
"it" certainly isn't "dead" but it is in a state of change. but nothing new there, it has always been in a state of change: from "tabulating", to "data processing", to "information technology"
and in the "information technology" phase the IT specialists provide assistance to the myriad of users who have now spread throughout the organization and into every department
GOOD business leadership determines the needs of the business and the market, defines and delivers a set of service requirements, and then works with IT to buy/build system(s) to deliver the required services. (On time and budget is a whole 'nother story) If IT is failing to deliver, then its poor management of the business and and IT dept that is in the wrong place in the decision making cycle.
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
"In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form," Carr writes. "It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people."
Sheeeyeah- RIIIIGHT.
Wrong on SO many levels.
Little miss dolly dots who can barely operate MSWord and her email client is going to have the expertise to "Control the processing of information directly"? Fuck no. People like that couldn't spill pee out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.
I'm in an academic environment. I work with a lot of really smart and VERY accomplished people, but that doesn't mean they know jackshit about computers. They need Mike (our I.T. god) on an almost daily basis.
A friend of mine works for a Well Known Thinktank. Nobel prize winners, genius types. Most of them wouldn't be able to distinguish a USB cable from Firewire if their lives depended on it. you could give them tutorials all day long - and all you'd be doing is wasting their time, which is REALLY expensive.
And setting up these networks? And troubleshooting it all? When the print server's on windows, but the file server's on linux and I'm on a Mac and need something to print NOW? I am I going to "Control the processing of information directly"? I could, but in fact: Fuck No. I'm gonna call Mike, the IT deity for our department and he will fix it. IT will never go away, because (not to sound snobby, just acknowledging reality) some of us have better things to do with our time.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It does make sense for some companies to focus on provided resources, and some very good examples are given. Further, it makes sense for many comanies to outsorce their datacenters (IBM has been a major provider of dedicate, vendor-run, datacenters, as is EDS).
Of course, these providers will still need employees (the electric company has employees running their power plants), though there's an effeciency that should mean less are neccessairy.
Also, data isn't electricity. It doesn't make sense for all companies to move to such vendor-supplied computing power. Firstly, there's already a decent amount of efficiency in large companies IT / datacenters (it would take as many people from a vendor). A more important consideration from a company standpoint includes control of data security, disaster recovery, etc.
Then there's the need for end-user support and oversight. Sure, the business units could control their directories, and user accesses... indeed they *should*; but illiteracy and simple idiocy is still rampant. They don't. They need their hands held, and they need someone who can protect the company from the results of stupid mistakes.
And with all this we still are only discussing the server-storage side of things. Computers will not be in use in 20 years?!? OK. What will we access Google Apps on? Smart Terminals? I've heard that pefor. You won't need people to install and maintain the computers/smart terminals? There are people here who maintain the lights, and power outlets, and desks; why would these be better/more reliable?
Then there's the networking infrastructure (routers/switches/etc), the actual vendor interation, Auditing (Sorbains-Oxley anyone?). Can a business manager just add anyone to the network? What about cross-unit accesses?
Costs and licensing still needs to be managed. My depatment prints more than a million pages a month. We have two people just to run the printers. Then there's the reliability question inherent in any online software/access.
In the end, for large comanies, at best, we are discussing contracting out data-centers. That's beeen going on for decades.
Ive been predicting this for a while now.
While IT wont totally dry up, especially in huge shops, i do see a large part of the market for IT in the SMB world disappearing. The trend is already there.
We have pretty much 'technologied' ourselves out of a job.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
During the early '80's all I heard was not to go into programming because computers will soon be able to program themselves. Still waiting for that one to happen...
There are actually people who are into raw milk, suggesting that the analogy is perhaps not quite appropriate - unless you're suggesting that society is likely to develop an energetic Luddite business community.
[Ego]out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
And I'm not even going to bother debating the absurdity of his electricity-computer power comparison...
My company insists on thinking of IT as a cost center rather than a strategic advantage. They would sacrifice millions of dollars in engineering productivity for the sake of saving a few thousand in the IT budget.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Why such a beef with IT in general?? Oh, I know - he didn't realize that his IT department was monitoring him with Websense and he was BUSTED surfing pr0n. Since then, he's been on a crusade. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Heh, I remember when vitrual terminals were going to replace PCs. Except it turned out that once you buy a monitor, keyboard, basic pc the additional cost of putting an OK processor and memory in it is less than a giant virtual server farm. And it works if your network is down.
Others have said one day we will not be needed because computers will become so easy to use and trouble free. That is true, so long as you never want your PC to do any thing new! The moment you want something new, welcome back to the IT department.
It is hard to imagine, based on engineering limits, that WAN bandwidth will ever be as cheap for the same speed as LAN bandwidth. So a WAN based service works great, if files never get bigger!
Will IT departments change? Sure, more specialization, and horray for that. But there is infinite working in cyberspace available, people will always want more!
There are lots of jobs like that, computers change them, but in the end they let up do new things and offer new services we couldn't before.
On my last job, I used to BE the 'IT Department'. No meter if you outsource your IT Dept to IBM or pay a low budget nerd to do your stuff, you will always have a TI Dept.
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
Darwinism doesn't just affect critters. Now - if you happen to be in an IT department, doing things the same exact way you did 10 years ago, using the same skill sets you had 10 years ago, because you haven't seen fit to expand them, yes..you are heading for the career dirt nap. Same as the critter world, evolve or face extinction. However - if you keep current with your skill sets, learn new methods, push new ideas, *LISTEN TO NEW IDEAS*, there will ALWAYS be a place for you in the IT field. I would argue the sheer speed of technology evolution guarantees those that can adapt will have secure employment for a lifetime. I find I have learned more "new" ideas and methods over the last 1.5 years, than I did the previous 8.5. Many of which allowed me to bring a new or better service to those who depend upon me doing a good job. Which in turns...solidifies my position. I truly do not worry about 'future' tech, or having a way to pay for my retirement.
We've heard this before. There's a presentation in AFIPS 1966 in which someone from Control Data was saying that each metropolitan area would have one giant, shared supercomputer.
"Grid computing" was a flop commercially, once the vendors started charging for it. Sun's service is still around, but they don't talk about it much any more. That was more like an effort to find something to do with their unsold server inventory. ResPower Render Farm has a real but very specialized business, quietly rendering 3D frames for the film industry.
Amazon has been making some noise lately, but they don't promise much: "Without limitation to Section 11.5, we shall have no liability whatsoever for any damage, liabilities, losses (including any loss of data or profits) or any other consequences that you may incur as a result of any Service Suspension." Clearly they're not serious about offering a service to businesses.
There are successful services, like Salesforce, but those offer more than raw compute power.
He isn't saying that companies shouldn't invest in IT, he's saying that a company cannot create a long term strategic advantage over another company simply through IT infrastructure. He feels that the nature of IT makes it very to replicate things between companies.
/br
Consider technology companies and you will see this is true. Apple for example, is well known for their high quality technology products. However, it seems that within months of them releasing their next hot product, some company has made some kind of knock off. Apple is successful afterward because of their brand. It has a certain image that people buy into that can't be replicated. So Apple's strategic advantage is in their brand, not in their technologies. They maintain their brand by continually releasing hot new products.
Google is similar. After Google became successful, everyone and their dog started copying their advertising model and their cool apps. Google remains a leader because of the brand it built and the following it created. While Google's products are cool, they are not the most superior out there. I argue that for them, it is also the brand that gives them most of their value.
Now, if you consider this idea in light of the open source software movement, his opinion is even more compelling. In the long run, the cost of software will approach $0. This doesn't mean that it will cost $0 to run and maintain it, just that the costs will become very uniform throughout different industries.
There will always be needs for custom software, but if that need exists, it will be throughout the industry you are competing in. This makes it a matter of operational effectiveness and less about strategy.
I wouldn't go as far as he does in saying that the IT department isn't necessary, but I think that many companies do things in-house when they should really be outsourced.
Every time I see anyone reference Edison in any kind of positive way, I just feel morally obligated to point out that him along with JP Morgan were some of the biggest assholes in science.
The real name we should remember with awe and praise is Nikolai Tesla. He deserves the spot in history that Edison unjustly occupies and he deserves at least me trying to make the effort to point this out to you all, even if I get modded down for being off topic. He deserves better.
Local IT divisions will always exist for a few good reasons:
1. As much as remote access is convenient, people still have a love and preference to socialize with people. After all that's what makes us human. Besides, my experience in support is that personally being there and helping out is far better than trying to give out instructions over the phone. It also takes a bit of the mystery out of what you actually do for management.
2. External Contractors don't always care about your company's well being. They'll do the bare minimal to ensure they can get more work out of you in the future. Local IT staff (at least good IT) tend to prefer to get everything working perfectly because that means less work for them or time to work on more interesting things. There's a joke that good administrators tend to look like they're doing nothing which has more truth to it than you would think.
3. Many companies use customized systems and configurations that benefit from someone being locally there and experienced. Centralized systems tend not be as loved due to the fact that staff can quickly run into limitations.
Just like payroll goes to ADP, security guards come from Briggs, HR/Benefits are outsourced to Fidelity, the cafeteria is run by Sedexo, toss your IT to IBM or Accenture or CSC or HP or someone. If it's not something you see a strategic advantage in doing then don't do it. Why would you?
Sure, IT should be aligned with business goals and processes. But on the other hand, the IT people coming up with the strategies for the business might be doing so because the rest of the company can't pull it off. Seriously, when was the last time that you saw any innovation coming out of accounting? Or HR? Or for that matter, the executive suite? In most of the companies that I've worked at the IT department is far more creative, logical and procedural than any of the departments that were being supported.
If you need to drive change in a business, you need to look to the creative people to do it, regardless of where they live in the building. If you can only see changes that come from executive row and their closest pals in finance and accounting as being worthwhile then you suffer from the same blinders that drive most companies, especially those that are past the point of having the founders be the senior management team and have moved into the "Let's hire as many MBA's as we can" stage. Or they aren't looking for internal growth, just to buy other companies or outside products for growth.
Having worked at both, I know where I'd rather be working (if I wasn't doing it on my own now).
the IT department ... will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud
I'm sick of this love affair with "the cloud" (which I understand to mean " on the internet"). The cloud is neither reliable nor secure, and storing your sensitive data in it is suicidal. By the time you make the effort to secure your data (and secure access to it as well), you might as well have kept it on-site.
As the cost of creating and running online ventures plummets the need for large groups of 'suits' to fund and manage said ventures will diminish with many 'suites' being replaced by smart automation.
A lot of the innovative businesses were created by techies. Example: Google (Page & Brin), Craigslist (Newmark), Yahoo (Filo & Yang), YouTube (Hurley & Chen). And these days even more ventures are being self funded - no VCs needed. This article by Paul Graham The Venture Capital Squeeze sums it up quite well.
The meek don't need to inherit the Earth - they already own it !!
Art Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
LOL - that pretty much sums up this article.
Now I know why so many people 'quit' Slashdot on a regular basis. Give me news, not over-hyped B.S.
I can see it now:
Cue hysteria and otherwise undue attention.If every business used 100% vanilla package software, and no customization was needed to integrate Package A to Package B, then maybe this conjecture might be true. But there are two rationales for having an in-house IT department: (a) One throat to choke when it comes to support; and (b) The widely prevalent and generally unfounded belief that "our business is unique and requires significant customization" which means you need IT business analysts and developers to specify, implement and maintain those customizations. The driver for this is not strategic advantage, it's just the inability to comply with standards and to manage arbitrary complexity.
These B-school weenies should really get out to some real IT departments more often.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
So printers are going to unjam themselves now? Are hard drives self-healing or something? Does Microsoft Office install itself?
I stop reading IT stuff over the holidays and I miss so much.
Sure, not every small business uses MS stuff, but the cost advantage of SBS2003 is pretty significant for many small companies.
Microsoft got smart, and is now allowing installations across servers, rather than having to have everything on one box, so I expect the trend away from embedded IT to continue.
Having worked in the IT industry for both the College Education system and in Pro Audio (think Warner Bros, Universal, Sony), I can say that I was shocked to learn how utterly helpless gifted, brilliant, and educated people are.
Most professors at the University, whom were honored scholars, prize winners, and very well respected and brilliant individuals had absolutely no ability to operator a computer out side of the bubble thy built. If you tried to deploy a new version of a program, they would immediately go to your Director and start pulling rank. I heard numerous threats from Professors about how some new piece of software has "made [their] job impossible to do and [they] will quit if it's not fixed immediately".
It gets even worse in Pro Audio. Most engineers at major studios are very helpless. Even though they've mastered 100 albums and could produce a Top 10 hit with out even thinking about it.. If you ask them to "Trash their prefs" (on Mac OS), the first thing they ask is, "where's that?". So you say, it's in Macintosh HD (think back to OS9).. Their next question is, "where's that?".
Average people, above average people, and everybody else, will always rely on some kind of IT professional.
WTF? That makes no sense whatsoever. That's how you know the guy is completely clueless.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
So what you do is you take the specifications from the customers and
you bring them down to the software engineers?
TOM
That, that's right.
BOB PORTER
Well, then I gotta ask, then why can't the customers just take the
specifications directly to the software people, huh?
TOM
Well, uh, uh, uh, because, uh, engineers are not good at dealing with
customers.
BOB SLYDELL
You physically take the specs from the customer?
TOM
Well, no, my, my secretary does that, or, or the fax.
BOB SLYDELL
Ah.
BOB PORTER
Then you must physically bring them to the software people.
TOM
Well...no. Yeah, I mean, sometimes.
BOB SLYDELL
Well, what would you say... you do here?
TOM
Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so
the engineers don't have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at
dealing with people!!! Can't you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS
WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!!!!!
"I can't imagine big business thinking that it'd be a good idea to put their information security in someone else's hands." - by TubeSteak (669689) on Monday January 07, @11:23AM (#21942826) Oh, don't think it CAN'T happen (unfortunately): When you have dolts running MIS/IS/IT departments who didn't "grow from within the ranks" & instead, were hired on because they have their "Paper MCSE" instead. & to "trim costs"?
Believe it. The customer today is NOT the person buying goods & services from you guys... it's the stockholder.
Because of them, you get these "costing cuts", but NEVER from the FAT salaries the useless 50 VP scumbags @ the top get... oh no, can't have that!
Most of these corporate mgt. fools haven't done a damn thing hands on over the years (much less in IT/, much less decades, & only possess mgt. certifications (NOT degrees even) of some dubious kind, & sit around reading "Entrepreneur Magazine" etc. et al) & articles written quite often by those of the SAME ILK...
That type?
Hey - They are ONLY THERE TO ADVANCE THEMSELVES (often getting companies into millions of dollars boondoggles in an attempt to be able to say "I implemented & spearheaded this project" (but, totally omitting the fact they didn't do a DAMN THING to make it work, IF THEY COULD, themselves) & AT YOUR EXPENSE AS THE ACTUAL PRODUCTIVE WORKER!
IF they can show somekind of "savings" (usually some short term one, & it rarely works out this way, & instead incurs MORE costs), it convinces the dolts above them it is "GOOD TO DO"...
Yea, ok: Take away monies from workers out there... & WHO IS GOING TO HAVE THE DISPOSABLE INCOME TO BUY YOUR PRODUCT or SERVICES?
So, that all said?
How many of you guys who actually DO THE JOB, have seen "bosses" like this? Personally??
I have seen TOO many.
I.E./E.G.-> I have only had 2-3 employers that truly, TRULY, really knew their stuff & with CURRENT toolsets, over a 15 yr. professional career in this field (ranging from field tech, to network tech, to network admin, to programmer/analyst. to software engineer).
I'd strongly wager, it's the same for most of YOU reading, also.
Some guy I don't know, who obviously has a bad track record, is trying to sell a book based on an absurd idea.
And?
I have to agree 100%. Combined with virtualization, it's only a matter of time (and not much at that IMHO). Here are some examples of companies that don't have a server, much less an IT department (read the comments for more). http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/16/the-serverless-internet-company/
Yes, yes it is dead. And all of those thousands of employees working in them are just zombies. Come to think of it, that's not so far off from the truth.
IT = Information Technology
Is the department responsible for maintaining Information Technology dead?
Let's see. The worker bees down below need information to do real work. The executives above need information to make decisions. Managers need information to feel important while they herd the worker bees around and kiss executive ass.
Considering all the people who need the service, I'd say the IT department has a long and bright future ahead of it.
Will the IT department go out-of-house?
No. This brilliant idea looks great on paper, just like the "Office Software via the Internet" idea that's been kicked around in various forms since the late-90s. Here's why at least some of IT will always stay in-house:
1. Data Security
Just like storing "Customer-List.doc" on the network doesn't sound appealing, IT is wrapped up in business process and data assets. Companies keep these things inside walled gardens for very good reasons.
2. Flexibility in Priority
Managers and executives want the ability to set the priority of things. Making requests to another company just doesn't cut it. The boss wants to walk over to Joe (who is responsible for it, because he is well-paid to be responsible for it) and say, "Stop working on Project X for a moment, my e-mail isn't working." The boss also likes to know that Joe is dedicated exclusively to his/her problem and nothing else. If IT is out of house, who knows, maybe your competitor is the higher priority issue?
3. Customized Solutions
For whatever reason, every business I've ever seen requires a custom solution to do their work. Nobody is happy with anything commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS). Even if they can meet their needs with COTS, they'll always stick it inside, around, next-to, or juxtaposed against some custom thing that make the system as a whole a custom thing. When you build a custom thing, *you keep the knowledge in-house*. Intelligent business people realize this without being told. Businesses run by people with less foresight get burned when their custom solution vendor goes out of business and it's a costly mistake to replace the system, redesign the workflow, etc.
-----
In short, IT stays in-house in a business for the same reason that your nerves are embedded within (and well-protected by) your body. Information is the most important asset an entity can possess and control. Allow someone else to manage it at your own peril. (As a side note, I think it's scary when a computer scientist like myself understands the role IT plays in business better than somebody with a business education.)
Desktop support, IMHO, is not an 'IT' job, just like changing the oil in a car is not a 'mechanics' job. The point is that it's the reduction of skilled and unskilled workers needed within a corporate IT department. I've been through 3 outsourcings and there is very little 'IT' left in these companies. Avg. of 80% of the 'IT' dept. is gone. (Note: if you develop code for say Blizzard or MS, this is not support 'IT')
IT will continue to get more complex and more simple at the same time, this is one example.
The first objections people bring up when talking about utility computing is about security and something along the lines of "I'd never trust my data to Google." etc. The fear is usually something about having your data sold to a competitor.
But the fact of the matter is businesses trust their data with contractors all the time. Using a utility computing vendor is no different than trusting the contractor you hire in house. It's all dependent on the contract language and what is signed.
turning it off and on again?
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
Yeah, that's what the IT department is for. Strategic advantage. Not to, like, make the stuff work or anything like that.
most of my users can't even remember their passwords, I think my job is safe.
Basic game theory?
There is an economic principle known as "Opportunity Cost." In a nutshell, it boils down to time management...You have limited time, and so you must decide what to spend that time doing.
Now a big-brained academic could spend their time learning about computers (assuming that's not already their specialty), and become competent...They probably still wouldn't be as proficient as a full time IT guy because they don't do it all the time, but they could fix stuff if they had to.
The question is, why the hell would they do that? That's in no way their job, and the time they spend learning to do it half as well as someone who does it for a living is just time wasted that they could be using to do something that they do better. It's an opportunity cost. It's the same reason most of us don't make our own clothes. We're all smart people, we could probably figure it out...But WHY? What possible benefit is there?
I have this argument with my boss, who insists that all people in his department should be able to take over for all other people. While it can be done, the amount of time that is wasted in eternal cross-training so that I can do a job half as well as some other guy represents a massive opportunity cost which is manager brain is unable to reconcile with the decrease in productivity that follows.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
No, YOU are dead.
Idiot.
Carr is no dummy. He just wants to get attention and sell books and if PHBs want to spend the money on it, then they deserve what he is dishing. Somewhere he and John Dvorak are groping each other while they count their page hits and read their flame emails back and forth in some sadomasochistic orgy of some sort.
Anyway, if I can gleam anything out of the 'IT Department is Dead' type talk, it more relates to IT departments that are disconnected from the overall business strategy of the company. IT as some magic place where webservers and email and database servers live and the people that run them are aloof, hostile and arrogant is done and should be done. The concept that companies need to have a silo of people that just run IT and don't understand how they relate to the various business goals and initiatives is outdated. But, that could and should be said for any part of a company. If I have Finance people who exist in a vacuum and don't give a damn about others in the company trying to get their work done, then they should be 'dead' too.
Technology has allowed various business components to be moved outside the four walls of the tradition business but that has been the case in many other professions as well as IT. For example, look at independent bookkeepers, tax accountants, legal services, production, manufacturing and sales through VAR channels and distributors. But, when a component is key to what you do and how you execute as an organization, you would be crazy to have to outsource the decisions to people not looking out for your best interests. This is why companies have accounting departments, legal departments, etc.
I am sure his book will do well and PHBs will pontificate and assimilate with the 'IT is dead' rehashed mindset like they did with Carr and others dished it out the first time. Well-managed IT resources in any sort of company that are right-sized for the company and have direct reports to the key executive more than pay for themselves from what I have experienced. The whole 'IT is dead' crap is primarily just a way for PHBs to try and rationalize their own personal bad experiences with IT (i.e. the Dell they bought online and they can't get on their DSL or riddled with spyware) or the various failures of projects they have run or been a part of that had an IT element to them but went horribly wrong because of scope-creep and mis-management. Blaming technology and those that tell you it is not wise to proceed down a path is easier than blaming management.
I absolutely agree with MrCrassic's post.
.... but it's FAR cheaper than retaining another full-time I.T. person on staff, having to pay their benefits, etc., just because you have 10 or 15 situations per year where they'd come in really handy.
I work in a small business where despite being the in-house I.T. person myself, I also manage an outsourced consultant that I can bring in, on-demand, at an hourly rate. The combination of the two seems to work pretty well for us. I can take care of the vast majority of issues that pop up during the typical week, responding very quickly (since I'm right here, after all). If a printer jams, I can walk over and un-jam it. If someone has a question on how to change some behavior in Excel or do an advanced search in Outlook, I can walk over and help them out right away. These are things it'd be very ineffective to try to outsource.
On the other hand, we have the occasional larger-size project to do. (Perhaps it's a roll-out of a big software upgrade?) These are the times where it makes sense to me to call in the outside help, so I have an extra set of hands to help get the upgrade completed without turning it into a job that'd take all weekend long to complete. (And as we all know, two heads are better than one when you hit a strange problem, and brainstorming is required to figure out how to get past it.) The consultant may be expensive, considering what he's paid per hour of his time to be here
Andreesen did alright with Loudcloud, sold it to HP for $1.6 billion:
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/07/hp-buys-my-comp.html
Seriously - has anyone ever worked for a company where the MBAs aren't behind every fraudulent, misguided, or just plain stupid act that has run a company into the ground? I haven't. Looks like they're still trying to blame the last bubble on the decisions they made about technology. "New Economy" my butt.
We've already terminated the IT staff who thought a "Registry" was somewhere to get married. We intend to liquidate the rest unless MS Office 2003 SP3 is removed by morning. It's highly unlikely any of them are reading /. (or can even read come to think of it), but if they are a) get back to work || die and b) "Biff" on security has been itching to try out his new Glock in anger.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/05/ms_office_sp3_woes/
It's an interesting thought.
Businesses already use outside contractors for cleaning, catering, painting and decorating &c. So why not IT?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
We're doing science, and we're still alive!
... ask your competitors to stop investing in IT. They'll stop all their investments and give you the opportunity to compete on a level playing field. Not.
Well I guess it all works out, since (not to sound snobby) I have better things to do than do a bunch of research and write out equations all day long. Instead I get to sit on my butt, study martial arts, and pretty much do something I want to do while I wait for someone who "has better things to do" to pay me to fix something or design something to make his/her life easier.
:).
This is the real reason why the IT department will never die, most people can't even do level one tech support stuff themselves. Which pretty much a trained monkey with a knowledge database in front of him could perform. The reason why many PhD engineers from MIT, geniuses, etc. can't successfully upgrade their computer or figure out how to get their HDTV to work is because they never learned how. Yes being highly intelligent, as in any engineering situation is vitally important, but unless you where taught how to properly it isn't something you can inherently know.
You certainly wouldn't want most IT staff to engineer a chemical plant or design a bridge, just like in most cases you don't want an engineer to get anywhere near your computers
And for that exact attitude Mike the I.T. god probably thinks you're a total douche,
if Mike is really the I.T. god you say he is, he probably has a million other things
to do besides fixing your lousy printer. That sort of thinking is what resulted in the
book being discussed in the first place. It is an over simplified view of what IT does.
Mike is probably also maintaining a non-heterogeneous environment that requires an
awful lot of support and technical skill, and a quickness of response unlikely to be
found in a large enviroment. The average user just does not see that, they see
the IT guy who fixes my printer. The average user doesn't care what goes on behind the
scenes and never will, this kind of tripe will always be around because of that.
Carr's "infamous" HBR article in 2003 made it appear that he's either an idiot, or someone just looking to get attention however he can. Furthermore, the five years that have passed since that article have proved him WRONG. Not just slightly off, but flat-out wrong in nearly every prediction he made.
Why are we bothering to listen to this idiot now?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/061305widernetcarr.html
06/13/05
[...]
Two years ago, Nicholas Carr was an IT outsider with a provocative take on the future that unexpectedly touched off an industry firestorm.
[...]
Rather than disappearing as a forgotten flashpoint, Carr today is part of the industry, sharing his viewpoints on the speaking circuit. It's a gig, he says, that has become his career and primary source of income. He has given presentations or made public appearances around the globe nearly three times a month for the past year. And the next year probably won't be much different.
The guy has been "in this business" for a whopping four years, giving a few presentations each month? People are listening to him because he wears a tie. Must be, it can't be based off merit, can it?
MMO Vampire Role Playing
This guy appears to be an idiot
1.) Every project has its own unique requirements and, so, "one size fits all" is usually a bad strategy. COTS can be used, but how to continually evolve those COTS together into a real world business solution is something you need the IT department for.
2.) Even when you are willing to accept the disadvantages of a generic solution, there are tradeoffs in the "early adapter"/"late adapter" decision which require an IT literate person to properly contextualize. Navigating by dead reckoning (that is, purely quantitatively) for any sustained period of time is expensive and/or moronic.
And, that's because the mantra today out there in business, is this:
"LIE, CHEAT, & STEAL (if not kill) to GET TO THE TOP"
Face it: Things today, in "corporate america" are for shit, because the leadership of them doesn't give a damn anymore about building a better mousetrap, & only for profits purely (shortterm usually, quarterly ones)... for their own grossly overinflated payrates, and stockholders, only.
Small wonder people stopped buying U.S. made products, vs. those from other nations (automobiles being 1 example thereof), because cost cuts lead to inferior products, AND SERVICES, period. Everyone knows it.
(And, it only take 1 ROTTEN APPLE, to make the rest of them have to do the same).
Our citizenry in the states is made up of every nation on the planet... & it's not the workers of the U.S. that suck...
Show us a buck, the RIGHT buck, & we'd work ourselves into the grave for it, for our families (we work longer hours than ANYONE on the planet in fact - Personally, for example: I put in CONSISTENTLY 50-60 hrs. per week on salary, & that's not as much as others do @ times).
Salaried pay was the KEY to that shenanigan, & little to no benefits was next, & then UNION BUSTING.
NEW NEWS: It's our "leaders" that suck (& they are QUITE often unqualified dolts there to do just 1 THING: cut costs, & increase profits of stockholders, in the short term, regardless of product or service quality).
Afrer all: We are ALL "expendable assets", right? "AT-WILL" employees... who's will though? Some a-hole that can't do our jobs, much less even NEAR the proficiency we do them at, no less... who earns 2-3x the compensation we do.. & for what?
"creating policy", lol... give us a fucking break!
We are all nothing but "monkeys" (& yes, I have actually HEARD those types calling productive workers that VERY THING) for the dolts @ the top who are the TRUE stooges!
Mgt. stooges who couldn't do the job their subordinates do, to save their lives (which makes sense - most of the mgt. out there today is unqualified on almost every level there is, by comparison to their subordinates).
Yes: Capt. America IS truly dead.
Get rid of each corporation's "100 VP's" instead - OUT with the "frat house" mentality, save money on THEIR payrolls instead... things would work out.
Keep this crap up though? America goes DOWN THE TUBES.
"In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form," Carr writes. "It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people."
Wasn't this the very problem RPG was supposed to solve?
Sure, in theory a utility company could have a massive server setup and serve thin clients out to consumers. When something breaks in a company are they really going to want to wait a week for someone who has no idea what they're doing? That may be ok for home users who are used to waiting weeks to get their internet fixed by the cable company, but not businessThat's a pretty big hole in the guy's argument.
Google and YouTube can have minimal IT staff because they have designed their businesses from the ground up to be this way. Other businesses, like financial corporations, have their business rules imposed by Congress and the IRS. Almost every new rule from the government, like the paperwork reduction act, actually increases paperwork and the expences with it.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Most keep their IT proprietary and in-house. Proprietary for the reasons I've given above. The keep it in-house because they realize that, by outsourcing it, at some point they are going to end up paying consultants for a system and those consultants are free to take the lessons learned and apply them to all their clients.
Have gnu, will travel.
...but I'm working on it. I need some bigger guns.
My. God. Really? Is this incredible twit back again preaching the same sermon but with different analogy's? He wasn't correct the first time he predicted this and, believe it or not, he's not right this time.
There will always be companies for whom technology isn't a differentiator to their core business. However, there will also be those companies for whom IT is viewed as a strategic tool that shouldn't be outsourced to someone who'll "just keep the lights on". To believe otherwise is just, well, silly.
So, please, Mr. Carr, silly walk your idiot self out the door and stop assuming you can predict the future of an entire industry. You're just not that smart.
Oh, for the days when sig's didn't have to be cute...hey, wait a sec.
him: I couldn't believe it. This senior person, not a special needs basketcase but a senior executive, she's giving a presentation down south. It goes great for an hour and a half and then her computer dies and I get this frantic call.
me: So did you tell her to plug it in?
him: Yeah. She left the cord at home. I ask her why she didn't bring it with her case and she's like "But you never told me to!" So I'm like "I didn't tell you to breathe, either, but you're still managing."
me: That's what you wanted to say.
him: True. I'm still employed, after all.
I do think that there will be changes in how IT operates, in the computers, technology, and software, but end users will still be end users and someone will have to translate for them. IT people will remain as necessary as lawyers and accountants -- we take the time to learn things you (the business owner) have no interest in so you don't have to. If you think IT people are snarky about stupid end users, just talk to some health care professionals and hear them rip on people for being so stupid when it comes to medicine and the human body. "They're waiting for a stool sample? Did they miss the part on the chart that mentions a bowel obstruction? This isn't advanced medicine, this is logic 101! You're not getting it if it isn't coming out. What are they doing to treat the obstruction?"
That being said, this author is just another Dvorak troll making a controversial claim to get everyone's feathers ruffled and rake in the hits. Here's my article claiming Linux is the OS for homosexuals, Ubuntu fondles children, and running Vista will get you action with all the hot IT groupie chicks. Where's my ad money?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I think you have a very different definition of "IT" then I do. The tasks you outline are not what I'd call "IT". I'd call those "Help Desk". IT professionals don't drop by the put paper in your printer. Just as you have "better things to do", IT professionals also have better things to do then hold the hands of the computer ignorant and explain things like "insert paper" or "right click your mouse".
In fact, that kind of job doesn't require an "IT God". All it takes is a 1/2 ass computer savvy college kid working as an intern for 6 dollars an hour. And this is exactly what the article is saying. The true IT departments are the ones that design and maintain the companies infrastructure. Your business may be too small to have one or you just might never actually see him. Your description is the technical equivalent of suggesting that the guy that changes your car's oil is the same as a mechanical engineer that designed the car.
Personally, I don't think this role will disappear completely. However, we are likely to see larger companies scaling back their full time staff as traditionally "in-house" services are contracted out. Doesn't mean IT disappeared, just means their job has shifted.
Right around 4 years ago, I made a decision to get out of IT. Not because I didn't like it (I've spent most of the past decade since school making six figures or close to it), but because I had a very hard time imagining a good life after ten more years of being in IT. Sure, I could move up into management (but I'd decided that managing more than 3-4 people is a drag, and/or I'm just not good at it -- recognizing one's level of incompetence is important), or I could keep on at the level I was at. I was married, though, starting a family, etc. Being on-call 24/7 sucks. Not being able to take a vacation without worrying about things falling apart sucks. Being tied to the local economy sucks when you've decided to move out a big metro area. Etc. etc.
There were two events that finally crystallized things for me:
1. I worked myself out of a job -- I partnered with a friend who needed someone to run the technology for a company he'd bought. I did such a good job of improving the infrastructure and training the junior sysadmin that we got to a point where we agreed that my six-figure salary did not make sense anymore. We parted ways, mostly amicably. Unfortunately, I had relocated to a part of the country that has a feeble economy, and the local IT jobs paid half what I was making, at best.
2. After spending time looking around locally and nationally for another lead sysadmin job, it finally dawned on me that I was screwed. My most enjoyable times as a sysadmin were when I was younger, single, and working for startups with more money than they knew what to do with. I had lots of responsibility and cash, and used both to make my job what I wanted it to be. Nowadays, I can't afford (literally!) that kind of job, and besides, I'm overqualified to be the young go-getter in a startup. The alternative is to go and work for an "established" IT department, which would give me the salary, benefits, and (most of) the stability I need now. Bleah.
Ultimately, I realized that the problem with IT is that it is a cost center. Those with a business background will be familiar with this concept, but it was an epiphany for me. Just like admin assistants, HR, janitorial staff, and facilities folks, IT are leeches on the company's resources. In a startup, the IT folks can play a role in creation of product, but in big, established companies, IT is there simply to maintain competitive parity with other companies. If executives could get rid of all those stupid servers, printers, desktops, whatever and simply focus on creating profits, they would. And so, when crunch time hits, IT gets hurt along with all the other cost centers.
With that realization in hand, I started re-shaping my career to get into product development. It's taken me a few years of scut work (having to start over again was something of a shock), but now I'm well on my way along a new career path in the world of HPC. It's a pretty narrow niche, but it's exciting and lucrative (for now). I create product now, and so I am directly responsible for increasing the corporate profits (hopefully!). I'm out of cost centers. I expect that I'll probably have to reinvent myself again at least once before I'm ready to hit the beach, but I've discovered that it's not so bad.
I guess the point of this rambling post is to encourage others in my previous situation to embrace change. Don't be afraid of the transition period. Accept that things will probably change anyhow, so it's best to be the one driving the change, rather than feeling victimized. Finally, make sure that you're still having fun. My father-in-law is in his mid-70s, and he still wakes up feeling excited about work every day. That's how I want to be.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
SAS has been gaining traction potential lately and with web-centric solutions to classic LAN based problems and solutions poping up left, right and center it's hard to believe this won't have a long-term effect on some businesses.
But with an even further increasing userbase IT problems are actually getting more and not less. Just an hour ago I was at a T-Shirt stitching shop. You should imagine that the people in charge there - even if in their mid to late 40ies - would know the most basic common user access standards and procedures for working with PCs. The lack of basic knowledge, not to mention basic knowledge needed when dealing with digital media (which you should have if you are in charge of such a business) was bizar.
When talking to customers it suprises me time and time again how much I know in comparsion to these people. Now I just need to learn to ask for the appropriate amount of money.
Bottom Line: As long as IT is that complicated to most people as illustrated above and as long as therefore dealing with IT is also very much a matter of whom a business trusts and whom not, the internal IT dept. won't die out.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It depends on what the IT department is doing for the company. If the company is selling hot dogs or pursuing some equivalent activity, then IT is not going to generate value. IT then just supplies administrative tools to keep track of things, and having your own IT department may make as much sense as making your own paper.
If the company is in high tech, research & development, or in an environment where logistics are critical, then IT could make a real difference in the efficiency and profitability of the company. Then outsourcing it amounts to being satisfied with second-rate solutions and a business handicap, because no external supplier is going to understand your business well enough to make a competitive difference.
On the other hand, if that is the case, the company probably should not have an IT department. It should have an engineering department which considers IT just as one of the many available tools to improve the profitability of the company. In many cases IT developments only make sense in harmony with other forms of engineering; a robot needs both hardware and software.
So in a sense, I would back the idea that the IT department as such is dead. If the IT group is just doing IT and not involved in the rest of the company's business, then it might as well be outsourced. If it is an active, fully involved player in the company business, then it is there to stay, but then it is much more than just an IT department.
The arguments I've seen against this article are as follows:
1. Users are too dumb, we need people on site.
Remember, we're talking 20 years. Your kids will be the ones in front of the PC. You know, the ones that can use a computer better than you?
2. Who will provide on site support?
No one, it won't matter, the burden will shift into the cloud. On site you'll have routers/switches managed remotely and some kind of "thin client"-ish device. When it breaks, you'll have 2 or 3 people trained on site how to get one out of a locked cabinet and replace the old one (read: unplug and replug about 4 color coded cables in the back). Again, this will be performed by people who've been using computers for the ENTIRE LIVES. Not Joe in accounting who hadn't touched one until grad school (save for downloading porn).
Don't worry, if you're on slashdot, you'll be fine. It's the other idiots that need to worry.
Nicholas Carr is dead
-- The IT department
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Users are all extremely smart and can create a access database on Vista to handle all the business processes in any corporation.
Databases...never crash and never need to be backed up or recovered. They have endless storage in a big commodity hardware "cloud" that is infinite.
I want to live that guy's world. Hell I'll pack my box and head home. Toss the pager and cell phone into gutter and spend the rest of my days sailing. Obviously he has not has his "clue bat" beating yet. Let me write it on a nail and pound it into his tiny head:
Information Systems can not and never will support themselves using nifty corporate speak phrases, like "cloud" and "commodity hardware". There is no great and powerful Oz. It's just another IT staffer behind that curtain.
I have an alibi, so you can not convict me of being the murderer. Tim S
The IT dept is not dead -- it's just in a PT Cruiser now.
Unfortunately because most users fail to see the difference between the two, a lot of IT people are expected to fill both rolls. While I would not call myself an "IT God", (and I think any decent IT professional would say this) I have an awful lot of expertise in one head. One day I might be talking to several department managers and V.P.s about how to go about rolling out a global messaging system, and the next I am explaining to a user how to open an attachment. The problem is that the article does not seem to differentiate between any of these roles and just simplifies it to "IT guys". That kind of thinking understates the role of many IT professionals in smaller shops.
And actually - an IT department is the lubrication of the computer services. 90 percent of the time it's just bread and butter like handling backups, tending printers and managing user accounts. The other 10 percent is more interesting - it is the question of resolving problems, rescuing data, handle computer security and crawling into unknown spaces finding the correct cable.
Especially the security measures are important in today's world of ever-changing threats. It is important to be able to perform some swift responses to resolve problems. This in turn requires a thorough understanding of the system installations.
Show me a business where the IT department isn't needed and I will see a stagnant or dying business. You may be able to outsource some functions, but then you have an IT department - just not on site - and with extended response time.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
They're going to be pissed.
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/01/the_cassandra_m.php
Nick Carr actually cites that idiot Jeremy Reimer as some authority on his blog page. He won't take comments about it either anymore, once he saw this:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=41095&cpage=216#feedbackAnchor
There's his "expert" in Jeremy Reimer, in action, avoiding any questions that dealt in the material in question, in memory mgt. & more.
(With Reimer being off topic the entire time, and libelling + impersonating others on his webpage & getting in trouble with his ISP and hosting providers for it, threatening others with his forums friends, email harassing them & being caught in it alongside his pal Jay Little from arstehnica, PLUS lying about his abilities (or rather, lack thereof, in avoiding technical question material & others as well)).
So much for Nicolas Carr - another "stir up controversy" know-nothing about a particular field, citing other know-nothings, & trying to pass them off as experts.
Something tells me this guy was recently denied an admin account on his workstation.
Menus: Linux=function, Windows=vendor, OS X=as little as possible. Makes a statement, don't you think?
IT won't go away as long as we use what we know as computer.
I believe computing platform is changing rapidly and software layer has surpassed most IT admin's expectation of what it is originally designed to do.
With virtualization growing, there will come a day where entire software side of the computing is encrypted and changes made in the system & network can happen without physical changes.
This kind of IT landscape will permit hardware maintenance given away to 3rd parties with a complete confidence of system and data security.
You can imagine dataroom filled with heap of systems specially designed to support virtualization nodes. Under this specific hardware model, entire system is composed with many identical hardware and once system has integrated, then there won't be any changes made to the system. As hardware failure occurs, virtualization can automatically migrate onto healthy system while hardware is being replaced. Engineers who replace hardware do not require great deal of knowledge, because each unit is duplicated from single source and only required to have uniq ID/password to join the virtulization node.
For example, you can think of having hundreds of dvd-players connected and turned on which can be replaced upon automated failure notice by Engineer who knows how to find failed dvd-player and being able to exchange the unit. In the future, it will take 1 genius to design the virtualization unit and hanful of A+ certified engineer to replace the failed unit.
I believe, this will happen so people can better spend their time rather than doing mundane IT works. I believe automation will put people out of work, but at the end, it will free people from hard meaningless works, so people can pursue what they really believe.
Paul
You already posted to this story with one of your sockpuppets. The fact that all your Slashdot 'personalities' have negative karma for trolling doesn't give you permission to game the discussion system by shilling stories with multiple accounts.
I think people are confusing two jobs here: help desk is not necessarily Information Technology. It is a service provided by IT today, however to lump it all in with IT is the same over-simplification as lumping "HTML jockeys" in with "programmers".
If Sally in Accounting can't drive her Word to get to the printer correctly, or Joe's hard disk needs to be replace, those are always going to be a help desk job, and that's always best served on site (assuming there's enough of a demand to make it cost-effective). However, outsourcing applications, data storage, and other services will see a corresponding decline in in-house IT.
Which sucks for the help desk monkeys, as there's no easy ladder from help desk into the "harder" IT tasks.
But the IT services will be outsourced:
Many of you are laughing, but all these services are happening today at varying scales. Eventually it will be cost-effective.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
Every sysadmin, network engineer and DBA perusing /. today must be laughing at Nicolas Carr right now (and laughing even harder at any company that's ever paid for his expert consulting services over the years). It should be pretty obvious to anyone who knows where the Any key is that Carr has only an end-user's limited perspective of computing. If you've actually worked with servers, networks or databases, you know the complexity of those technologies can't simply be wished-away and then contracted to some kind of make-believe utility company that will somehow, magically be able to make all your information technology decisions for you.
Do you really think Carr's ever seen an IP routing protocol at work? Or looked at what goes into creating and maintaining even a basic SQL database? Information isn't a current running over a wire, it's dynamic and multi-dimensional and will always require a non-trivial amount of human intelligence in order to be useful to other humans.
Anyone who essentially tries to compare the problems of information technology to changing a light bulb should probably stick to writing about light bulbs and leave the hard stuff to the engineers. Carr's forecasts sound like nothing more than the bitter, uninformed rants of a person who is overwhelmed by technology and intimidated by technologists.
They've ascended.
"God, root, what is difference?" -- Pitr, 'User Friendly'
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Toyota(and most of the automotive design in that part of the world) isn't about to make anything w/ more than an underpowered engine for a car body if they can help it. There are some cars they can't seem to make, and that is what The Big Three(GM/Ford/Chrysler) will(and quite well).
GM at least pairs cars up with something that is there for more than just fuel efficiency, and if it's not in the price range, it will be there after it comes off someone's lease. They just need to have some regulation named Taft-Hartley repealed to let them do their work(optionally making unionbusting by any means illegal, for those "labor consultants").
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Really, I have no idea how to respond to TFA. It's wrong on so many levels.
While there is a point here that IT is changing in radical ways, didn't it always? IT has been a moving target for decades and will continue to be. Doesn't mean it's going away.
There's also the big problem he doesn't even seem to fathom; that any company worth its salt would rather have an IT department of employees. Why? Well, what happens if your primary production database goes down? Well, if you have an army of employees, you'll have an army of people mobilized in an instant to resolve the issue as quickly and reliably as possible because their jobs depend on it. If you have the same happen with "cloud IT" then you've got some call center rep in the Philippines who only knows you as customer X and really doesn't have a sense of ownership of the problem.
I must admit, I work in a Corporate IT environment after years of working as a consultant. I see the vast difference between the mindset of a consultant and an employee as a sense of ownership and a sense of being part of something bigger. Consultants (and cloud IT people) are tactical; they fill a need today. Employees are strategic; they try to do the best job they can to ensure they've still got a job tomorrow. Sure, it doesn't always work out and not everyone's of that mindset. However, I tend to find that those who do not have the strategic mindset tend not to last long in IT.
As much as I'd like to "ride the wave" of Cloud IT... knows I have the know-how to set up something truly great... I don't think it's going to be much more than an interesting aside to the IT industry as a whole. It'll provide some services to companies in the same way as consultants do; they'll fill a need in the interim until they can put in a permanent solution. The only place I see "Cloud IT" becoming a force to be reckoned with is the small company; less than 250 employees perhaps... where it's usually not cost-effective to maintain an IT department. A lot of the smaller end of this (100 employees) tend to hire consultants to deal with their IT needs... this won't be that different. However, there'll still be a need for the consultants in question to put in and maintain the local hardware.
But then there's the aspect of reliability; what if you can't get to your applications? Who do you call? The app vendor? Your ISP? The consultant who maintains your routers and may not be available until after 3pm? I know the small companies I still do consulting for like having local IT infrastructure (email, web and file servers) so that in the event something's really messed up and the apps don't work, worst case a phone call to me where I can talk a secretary through rebooting the file server usually does the trick. However, this isn't cloud IT... this is local IT supported by someone who's remote. Doable, but not something you need to rely on for your business!
Either pay for your one eq/software/people or pay for really good internet connection to these outsource shops and accept when the InterNet is down, so is the outsourced job functions.
I'm sure there will be plenty of shops that will bite on this idea, after being pissed off over Microsoft pricing.
The smart ones will look at the software used by the outsourcing shops and go get their own boxes to run that very same open source software.
Anyone who cites Jeremy Reimer of Arstechnica as an "expert/authority" in this field ought to be. Doing that, after this:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=41095&cpage=216#feedbackAnchor
About Jeremy Reimer (and in his own words quoted no less), where Jeremy Reimer:
A.) Reimer Impersonated & libelled others on his personal website
B.) Reimer was caught in that by his HOSTING provider who had parts of Reimer's website removed for it
C.) Reimer was caught email harassing others with his fellow arstechnica pal Jay Little as well (which Reimer's ISP stopped quickly no less)
D.) Jeremy Reimer's outright lies on Jeremy Reimer's part (like you would NOT believe - know what the definition of "charlatan" is? If not, look it up, & look @ Jeremy Reimer's last reply there... the VERY DEFINITION of the word in fact is illustrated in his weak replies (about money)).
There, you also see Carr's "expert" in Jeremy Reimer outright practice TOTAL avoidance of technical issues & being off topic the entire time, which makes sense - Reimer clearly can't function @ that level, period.
Thus, for Carr? Citing Jeremy Reimer of arstechnica is tantamount to professional suicide.
Carr won't take any comments on that either on his website where he cited Reimer.
Gee - I wonder why (not).
E.G.- Carr cites that charlatan fool Jeremy Reimer as somekind of expert or authority Cin this field, & Jeremy Reimer has no degrees in comp. sci/MIS/IT, or even certifications in it, much less years to decades of professional experience in this field either.
No, Carr's just another "author" like Reimer. Trying to incite sensationalism, to bolster a flagging career, & all for the "love of money".
I hope all my employer's competitors heed Mr. Carr's guidance. Isn't it cool when somebody tries to shrink wrap rules for CxO's about IT? Perhaps this same technique could be used to really cleanup at the Bingo Hall? I wish I could find more useful patterns in the chaotic evolution of IT over the last twenty years, my paradigm shift shoes are getting rather weather worn.
First mover advantage was touted by the Big 7..6..5..4.... consulting firms during the Internet bubble as a means of garnishing consulting business, as if they had any expertise in being "first movers." In fact, the internet bubble was not a first mover event, as the internet was, by then a decade old, and business access to it was over 8 years old under the "Acceptible Uses Policy" of the National Science Foundation.
First movers are generally the people with the new ideas, but there are rough edges and perhaps failures associated with being a first mover. The classic example, of course, are the early hobbyist personal computers, portable computers, and, as a software example, the first mover in spreadsheets - Visicalc. Lotus was NOT a first mover, but an early adopter after they saw that Visicalc had a good idea, and Lotus refined them and came out with a more polished and packaged version.
First movers also generally suffer two significant expenses, namely the development of the necessary internal capabilities and the creation of the external market. Early adopters generally can gain significant advantage by seeing, and correcting, the deficiencies of the first mover, thereby reducing start-up expense and also by benefiting from the emerging market that's been generated by the first mover without having to create it.
The message is that, like any other long distance race, being first at the start doesn't mean first over the finish line. However, getting too far behind the pack can eliminate you from the running. Many businesses tend to think of IT capability as an elective expense, but it's only elective to where in the pack you want to be compared to your competition.
I've got an observation that I dont see covered. I work for a medium sized company with 250 people and 50 mil in sales. I can't see our company ever letting our product information out into the "cloud". Our customer databases our product specs our shipping lists.....it goes on and on. Data security goes out the window if you entrust your data to a third party, i dont care what kind of contract you have with the company. Who in their right mind puts engineering data from new or even current products up on servers they dont control. This is mind blowing that somebody would think a high tech company (or any engineering company) would do this. Anyone remember how well Microsoft did with Hailstorm http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2001/mar01/03-19hailstorm.mspx ???? Zero
Spare me/us/everyone.
"the article asserted that IT investments didn't provide companies with strategic advantages because when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same." just has to be most retarded argument. Think of it this way... if company A upgrades then so does B, C, D, E and so on. If company X doesn't, it is now behind the curve in terms of being able to interoperate, maintain communications or what ever the upgrade was about, and this is especially deadly when it comes to customers (Say CRM)... the impact isn't immediate, ie the next day in this case, but long term if companies A - what ever offer better communications and customer service than your company X, you are toast... pure and simple.
So long as computers are complex enough that many users will not understand them (see prior works, like the human body, automobiles, home electronics, photocopiers, fax machines, telephones, clocks, etc., etc., ad nauseum)... there will always be a need for on-site people to support it. Especially when your organization depends on having it function.
Sorry corporate d00dz, but you outsourcing to sub-minimum wage call centers half-way around the world will not work. It will just make your users angry and frustrated, and they will stop calling when they have problems. If you consider having people ignore problems to be a solution... hey, good luck with that. I'm sure it will make your competitors VERY happy.
and all he means is IT = Internet Technology and believes that cloud based service of various kinds are as big of a change as the Electricity grid was... what that means for IT personnel is simply that the challenges and solutions CHANGE - they dont disappear - they merely (will) appear in a difference place.
Yeah, I feel the same way. I think what would be more valuable information than "IT is Dead" is where the companies Mr. Carr surveyed (assuming he's not just airing baseless theories) get their employees. I don't see many users like he's referring to. Most of the one's I've run into are closer to the drunken monkey end of the spectrum.
I think this is more typical in small shops or in low to medium level positions in large shops. I can already tell you what the response would be if I called the head Networking Engineer at my work and asked him to drop by office and take a look at the printer.
There certainly are gray areas and overlap, but I think this is more common at the low level. I'm not certain of the exact salary of the professional IT guys at my job. But I'd ballpark it in the low to mid six digits. . . quite possibly more. He doesn't even work on his *own* printer.
If they can think of a way to hand it off to the one lone adminstrative assistant (formally known as a secretary) and at several pay grades lower, they will.
Trust me...they've done that with "web developers" in many companies. Usually formally titled Admin Assistant II - Specialist.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair... Generally where the users is at
"Published in 2003, the article asserted that IT investments didn't provide companies with strategic advantages because when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same."
Using this logic, countries shouldn't adopt new military weapons because others would do the same and nullify the advantage? So let everyone else get new weapons, and hope for the best?
Idiot.
Command and Control has to be in-house; however, project oriented duties can most certainly be out-sourced on a case-by-case basis.
Why does CnC have to be in-house? The short answer is conflict of interest. A consultant or employee of an out-sourcing company represents the business interests of his or her company and not yours.
Why should project oriented duties be considered for out-sourcing on a case-by-case basis? Some duties already dovetail nicely with the company's core competency. In which case, you would have lower TCO and shorter ROI by going in-house. Otherwise, you should submit a RFP and pick the vendor whose responses, mediated through the filter of in-house expertise, indicate the lowest TCO and shortest ROI.
Right and you also would not call the CFO to answer a question about the company's tax return.
I would posit that the your head of Network Engineering is more manager at this point then technician
which just proves my point. If you want to bring salary into it, I'm about 1 pay jump away from 6 figures
today I am walking around changing static IP addresses (don't ask), more of the same tomorrow. Thursday I am deploying a web app to an international client. Title and salary don't play into it. The guys who get things done are the same in every company, and they always wear a lot of hats.
I've spent a little bit reading the posts on this thread, and while there were a couple of insightful comments like this one, most are filled with people either asserting that IT isn't going away because "stupid users do stupid things" and such, or arguing whether or not that can be mitigated.
Problem is, that's not really relevant. In a major corporation, what percent of the IT budget do you really think is devoted to the helpdesk? Any HR department can find a million people who would be ecstatic to be simple windows support for $10/hr, just by placing a sign in front of the door. Now, what about those who are in it as a career? HR can't put a sign up saying "Looking for Senior UNIX Engineer with 10+ years experience with HPUX, Solaris, and Linux; additional qualifications are strong proficiency in C and Perl, some experience as an Oracle DBA, and must be able to pass a security clearance for work with our DoD customers."
Yeah, I don't see that as being successful as just a sign in front of the door. And guess what? When you think of getting rid of those folks making $60-$100/hr (or more, sometimes and in some places), the numbers start adding up really fast without even considering getting rid of the guy that installs printer drivers on your desktop.
because when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same
That's probably true, but that doesn't mean you don't have to keep up. That's like saying that there's no point spending money on marketing because your competitors will do the same. There's a name for that type of competition escalation (it's not zero-sum, but it's a similar idea). One side increases a particular outlay to gain an advantage, their competitors do the same, and everyone ends up pretty much where they were before except working harder or spending more. Unfortunately you kind of have to keep playing.
This ties into a little bit of a Bertrand Russell piece I read recently, about how when the means of production go up beyond market demands, say by double, instead of the people employed by that industry working half as hard, half the workforce is laid off and the remainder work just as hard. Well, maybe it doesn't tie that precisely, but it reminds me that no matter how efficient we get, we always end up working just as hard as before.
Cheers.
They're called Wyse terminals, SunRays, and what-have-you. There's nothing stopping a small business with a decent internet connection from using a monthly, capacity-based Citrix or whatever hosting service.
Maybe the current services aren't mature or standardized yet, but I'm certain they'll be commonplace in the next 5, not 20 years.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
In the last several large enterprises that I've worked for, there were literally 100s of applications running on all manner of hardware/software combinations. We're talking everything from small embedded devices to the mainframe. Go ahead, outsource that to the cloud. I'll sit here and enjoy a mocha or two while you get on that.
Oh, you're back? Impossible to outsource anything but 5-10 of those applications? Well, that's not going to help me - now I'll have to add connectivity (and the resulting security) issues to my list of problems to solve. Because yes, all those 100s of apps all talk to each other in strange and wonderful ways.
Trust me, I'm not saying this is a good situation - complexity is a killer. However, this IS the way it is in companies of any significant size. Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if we could push a button and migrate to "the cloud"?
In the SMB world, Exchange is now something of a commodity. But in outsourcing this to "the cloud", I personally observed one small business have to make some compromises. We lost a lot of fine-grained control over settings, it hasn't been a smooth ride on availability, and the Exchange account database doesn't integrate with our local AD domain. Overall it was still worth it, but it hasn't been seamless. This is ONE application, in a small business.
Good luck, cloud people. I've watched industry trends for nearly 30 years now, and I'm not losing any sleep over this one. Not yet.
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
While you _did_ mention proactive work, I don't think you give it enough credit.
Proactive IT work is the difference between having guardian angels watching over your company
In my experience, companies that use IT 'vendors,' the out-sourced IT departments, are the ones that have to call 'IT' when something's on fire. Companies with IT departments
IT Departments are likely to make everyone pissed because your email will be down for a few *_MINUTES_* (!ZOMG!! not My EMAIL!~!%!)
IT Vendors are likely to "save the day" after everyone's email has been down for a day and a half ("Thank you, fireman!")
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I agree.
If one company adopts say, SAP for example, you pretty much do not get any advantage. Why? Simple. You bought a black box, and you run your business according to what the black box can do.
However, if we are talking about open source, and building I.T. services with source code, and not proprietary black boxes, then I disagree.
Why? For the simple reason that when I have the source code I now control the black box, and it is only black to my competitors, not to me. I can add features to the code that my competitors cannot, if I so choose to.
I like the fact you can be magnanimous and release the source code one step behind what your developing.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
We just smell that way. Too busy removing the coca-cola from your "cup-holder" to take a shower.
The IT depart should change. The standard B-school model of centralized departments hasn't worked very well. You put the IT department into a silo with minimal end-user contact and then expect them to understand the needs of the end-user. This creates a disconnect from reality and a perception from the end-users that IT doesn't care. As it becomes larger and more disconnected, and more and more a cost center, it becomes less responsive to the true needs of the end-user. So when some
charlatan comes along talking about client/server, webification, ERPs, utility computing, outsourcing, off-shoring or whatever the flavor of the month happens to be, IT gets the ax. What really happens is lower quality of service is often delivered at higher overall cost. Nothing has been said about the cost of commercial utility computing, but my guess is that when it starts to be sold to actual companies, the cost and complexity will be on the same scale as the current method. You haven't solved the complexity, just shifted it. It might work with low end applications or vanilla flavored applications, but not with something that directly supports an often unique business process.
Personally, I think a less centralized model works better. On paper it may cost more. But if you factor in lower time and better support of business processes, it pays for itself, IMO. This is how I think it should change.
Carr offers a grimmer future for IT professionals. He envisions a utility computing era where "managing an entire corporate computing operation would require just one person sitting at a PC and issuing simple commands over the Internet to a distant utility."
Yeah, right. Once again in many cases you haven't solved the complexity, just shifted it. Think tens of thousands employees requiring dozens or hundreds of applications, some of which are unique in-house applications (as opposed to utility computing out-house applications:) or unique customizations of ERPs such as SAP or PeopleSoft. You will need people well versed in the application to support it. One person will not be able to do so, nor will a generic utility computing provider.
In addition think of them all needing bandwidth at the same time. The network requirements will be huge.
He not only refers to the demise of the PC, which he says will be a museum piece in 20 years, but to the demise of the software programmer, whose time has come to an end.
How many times have we heard this? How many times has it not happened? Once again, as long as there is complexity you will need programmers and really heads up support staff.
Carr explains that factory owners
He is extrapolating from an industrial model to a service industry model. IT and programming is much more complex than manufacturing. But unfortunately most managers and pundits only seem to understand or be trained in a manufacturing mindset.
BTW, what ever happened to ASPs? To me it sounds like 'utility computing' is just a mutation of ASPs. It was all the rage at one time but then seemed to pass, like most fads.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I worked at a truck-stop company (Flying J) working on their point-of-sale system. Which, trust me, covers a multitude more sins than you'd care to imagine. This exchange pretty much sums up why IT in a place like that won't go away:
CEO: "So why can't we just buy off-the-shelf software to do that?"
Me: "Because there is no off-the-shelf software that does that. And by the time it's common enough that you can buy it off the shelf, we've had it in production and solid for 5 years."
Example: RFID for transactions. Flying J was starting to do this back in 2000 for the big-rig side of the station. Grab nozzle, fuel, hang up nozzle, take receipt. That was 8 years ago, and you still can't find off-the-shelf systems that do this, let alone that integrate directly into the rest of the POS system.
How the Hell can you make EVERY topic twist back to Microsoft twitter? Seriously, do you have a tin foil hat on in case the evil M$ is trying to beam thoughts into your head? I wish you'd blue screen already.
Pretty much every level of I.T. won't die anytime soon, and will more than likely grow as hybrid I.T. (both in-house and outsourced) converge to give a completely custom level of implementation, support, and development.
The one thing this guy ignores is the fact that every single site has individual needs and requirements, with different levels of infrastructure, different budgets, and different styles of management. Add that the physical architecture of the site and physical location are almost always different - even within the same physical regions - and you get a "one solution per site" setup, which somebody has to manage. That person (if they are smart) will realize that they will be more efficient with internal employees for some roles and outsourced employees for other roles, and they will likely fluctuate on a yearly basis if budgetary costs are to be kept in check.
As much as people like to talk about standards and/or turn-key solutions, you can't just define I.T. as a commodity and then go on with life or else your business will fail. You need at least one high-level manager, at least one help-desk guy, at least one developer (web, app, db, or other), at least one system/network/DB admin, and at least one phone support tech. Sure you can have small shops where 1 employee is expected to fill all of those roles except for maybe management, but good luck retaining someone that smart for more than a year. THAT is where 3rd party support shops do great, but that's limited to very small companies, say 15 employees or fewer. Once they start getting to 25+ employees, management starts trying to do funky custom things with databases, reporting, web services.
And honestly, what self-respecting I.T. employee wants to work on such a small scale? Nobody I know... I.T. becomes so much more easier to expense when their job affects 100 employees or more. Program a web-based timeclock for a 10 employee company... "why'd you do that? we're outsourcing payroll next month anyway!" Program the exact same timeclock for a 100 employee company... "good job on the timeclock, now I need a report that tells me how many employees didn't keep up with their timeclock and have it automatically emailed to my inbox every day." Program the exact same timeclock for a 1000 employee company... "memo to all employees: thanks to the long hours of our overworked and underpaid IT staff, we are rolling out a brand new timeclock system next monday. They are getting a new breakroom to show our appreciation for all their efforts. And a new cappucino machine to boot."
Well, I might've exaggerated, but you get the idea.
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
...it is completely ant totally wrong!
Even today U.S. Steel owns and operates electrical production plants and is working to increase the ouput, not decrease it.
You've hit the nail on the head there. The "big central energy generation" model is going the way of the dinosaur in this day and age. There isn't as much economy in scale anymore, and when you get to a certain scale the trend actually reverses. There are inefficiencies/losses in excessive transmission and distribution so it is actually more cost effective to localise generation. "Economy of scale" or "efficiency" was not the only reason public electrical generation supplanted a lot of smaller private generation...in fact it was probably not even the main reason. Government interference/regulation was a huge factor. Governments set up mandated monopolies and provided economic incentives for utility companies to be able to supply energy at a lower cost than local/private generation (mostly by giving favourable terms to utilities for the large capital expenditures required to build the plants that weren't given to the industry at large).
With IT, capital expenditures requires to set up the initial infrastructure are relatively low and falling wheres it costs a great deal of time and money to build a large power plant. Second, Electricity and IT services are not the same thing--everyone uses the same kind of electrons moving on the same kind of copper cable--it's all the same volts and amps and Hertz. IT services are more different than the same from customer to customer--different its and bytes, different business rules, different security and confidentiality needs. Finally, governments are not making policy decisions to deliberately steer the industry towards a "utility model" the electrical systems ended up.
In fact, I believe Mr. Carr is exactly 180 degrees off in his direction. Utilities, especially electricity generation, are in fact MOVING AWAY from very large central generating stations. Nobody wants giant dirty coal plants or huge ominous nuclear plants in their back yard--they are very expensive to build, complicated to operate and maintain and have a large impact on local ecosystems. Governments are deregulating, and big refineries and factories are being encouraged to build power plants again (co-generation is the newest old thing really). It is easier to get cash-flush commodities producers to build little natural gas generators that also happen to use excess thermal waste energy as well than it is to prop up nearly-bankrupt utilities to build gigawatt plants. Technology is even evolving to the point where utilities could become "super-distributed". Things like fuel cells could be implemented in office towers, apartment buildings and even community halls and large private residences, to meet the energy needs of the local area (even truck-sized nuclear reactors for efficient "campus-wide" power have been looked at). A distributed model is mre robust, more efficient and more flexible at meeting varied needs (and ultimately better for the environment).
The same goes for IT. Carr looks at evidence that large private data centres are going away and makes the logical leap towards the conclusion that they must be outsourcing to EVEN BIGGER, google-sized complexes that do everything for everyone in some "cloud". Well, he's got quite the wrong idea of the "cloud" if you ask me. The reasons the big private data centre and big IT teams are going away are more like the following:
* Virtualisation technology: the IT dept is providing everything it used to, but the physical machine count has gone down with the use of virtual machines. The number of "virtual" systems remains close to the same, and thought the head-count in the IT dept might get a bit lower, the reduction in people will not go down as fast as the reduction in machines.
* Distributed computing models. The "competitive advantage" (at the moment--Carr is right when he says competitors pretty quickly catch up) is responsivene
That the kind of rubbish i've come to expect from business schools.
so fucking what if it's not manager speak compliant? if IT isn't your core business then you shouldn't be worrying about your IT, you should be worrying about your core business.
and in all my years in the IT field i've seen outsourcing fail as many times as i've run into useless in house IT departments. it's all a matter of quality of staff.
As a rule of thumb when looking to outsource, if the person you speak to about the contract is a salesman and not a techie, ditch them right away. also, if your IT department is handling things just fine, don't outsource, dilbert managment style is not funny in real life.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
While the corporate IT department will probably never die, it will shrink. At one time, IT was as competitive advantage because it was so expensive that it didn't make sense for every company to have it. The following things are driving down the cost of IT, however:
- Baby boomer's retiring. If you've got a bunch of very smart old people making 6-figure salaries, paying 1 IT guy per 10 employees isn't that expensive if that's what you need to walk them through checking their e-mail. The next generation of workers will be far more computer savvy, however, so many of the IT guys who get by on just knowing the basics will be out of a job.
- Development getting easier - Languages like Java, PHP, and Ruby greatly improved development by taking care of memory management. Now if only we could get rid of HTML and Javascript as the only secure, distributed, deployment-free, cross-platform programming paradigm and replace it with something that lets you do a simple gui easily but has fully-featured GUI support, we'll need a whole lot less code jockeys.
- Further standardization - There were days when an IT guy had to be able to smell the ethers, search for tokens that fell out of the ring, and know what BCD stood for. Now, if you're familiar with Ethernet and TCP/IP, you know all you need to know to run a network at just about any company. Further standardization in things like e-mail, file sharing, and other common-to-all technologies will allow IT guys to specialize in a specific technology for each task (because it's the only one anyone uses) and do more more easily, leading to a consolidation in the number of IT people any one company needs.
For example, I know of a company that just outsource Exchange to Intermedia. About 150 mailboxes at $10/ea/mo (Academic) with 4G of storage each. That $18,000/year. Assuming a minimally competent Exchange Admin makes $50,000/year, you need close to 500 users to justify not outsourcing. Granted, your Exchange admin could do other things too, but not while providing the same level of support, and e-mail really does need to be an always-on technology. And you'd need at least 2 admins locally unless you never let them go on vacation or sleep.
The point being, IT will and should shrink, but those who remain in the business will be able to do a lot more with a lot less a lot quicker and more reliably.
Exactly. IT's not going away, but it will evolve as the technology evolves. Innovation isn't stopping any time soon. So as applications become more intelligent (and therefore more transparent), the job of connecting everyone everywhere to everything is going to get even more critical, not less. I think if nothing else, most people will be working "in IT" - and until our robot overlords arrive, in services too. Think "WalMart" and "Google" as being the two basic job options for everyone {shudder}.
The management would probably *love* to axe our IT department, and believe me I'm sure they've thought about it.
And then someone who "knows their stuff" - the kind of person they'd be relying on if they axed the IT department - has a go at fixing something and digs a hole 10x bigger. We come along and fix it, and the management realise they can't do without us. Happens everywhere in IT, where you are seen as a liability and tend to get the blame for everything including the weather - occasionally companies think they can get away with just people who know a bit about computers/networking, but the people who "know a bit" who are the most dangerous... it just takes pointing that out (by example preferably) to hang on to your job.
It can also make sense in an industry where every IT-oriented aspect of your business is much the same as any other in your industry and more or less every IT problem has already been solved. This hits the nail on the head. How many people are working at companies that have mature technologies. The business I'm in has far more opportunities for developing new products and services than we have money to fund. All of this new stuff requires new systems, processes, and support that doesn't exist anywhere now. How many companies are sitting around saying that technology can't improve them at all? Those companies can confidently move these processes outside the organization since they don't return on investment. For the rest of us, keep planning on doing more of what you've been doing.
and rocket fueled jet pack.
"The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google"... funny how Google runs their own Solar Power.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
No wonder you post at -1
What I mean by that is that so long as people view IT as something different and scary(which if you ask anyone in support they still do), there will always be "those people" that IT gets given to. They might be a contracting agency, they might be at a data centre, and non IT employees may never physically meet them, but there will always be an IT department so long as there is IT.
I don't think so, as a support tech I can say that from the tone of the GP's post that I really wouldn't mind dealing them, they seemed to hold a bit of respect for the IT guy and understood the issues support techs have to face (as you said IT techs get looked down upon a lot by the self important users).
So the GP would call Mike the IT god to fix his printer, well I don't see the issue there. It isn't the GP's job to get printers working but it is Mike's job, it's not the most glamorous task and most certainly the most important task but it still needs to be done. The GP has their own tasks to get done and any tech worth their salt these day's understands that and understands that it is their job to ensure that others can their work done with minimal issues.
I work with a lot of Developers and many of them are more than capable of fixing their own problems but most of them will still call me for support for two reasons, 1. They do have their own jobs to do and could probably do something else whist I am working 2. I can probably get the issue fixed faster than they could as it is my job to have all pertinent information about the network and systems supported.
As I said, I don't think the GP intended any disrespect to Mike or IT support tech's in general. I really don't mind dealing with the secretary that doesn't know how to operate the scanner as these people recognise that they don't really know what they are doing and will treat the tech with courtesy and respect. It's the people who think they know better than the support tech who are a pain to deal with, in particular management (who just don't understand that things break especially if they screw around with them) and some Developers (the type that think they are gods gift the the development world, I really hate being looked down upon).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Yes and no. I agree, in general - people need to do their jobs, and it's mine to make Windows work or whatever. One thing that get's missed is that if the secretary's recent assignment is to scan in 200 paper forms a day into a PDF document database, they can't be calling me for each scan. I can't do their job AND mine(If I could, why not just fire the secretary, or vice versa?).
So while I'd have no trouble teaching them how to use the scanner for a day or two - some technical things become part of other employee's jobs, and they ought to learn how to do that. I think most general e-mail falls into this category as well by now. Or, if you do need someone to write your e-mails for you, maybe an IT support person isn't the best choice (get a secretary?).
To the other topics above - while IT is there to facilitate you doing your job - if you're a programmer, your program is crashing and you call IT and IT says, here's a link to that issue, you need to modify the way you load a dll, and you then use the Admin access you were given (due to a business case to need to add and remove hardware a lot) to *UNINSTALL you IDE!!!* - that's not so good.
In fact, by ignoring IT, you've now taken your PC out of productive use for a day or so, and wasted some IT people's time, as well as your own.
I'm not a programmer, but what thought process leads you to
A) ask IT for programming assistance when you're hired as a programmer
B) ignore their research and recommendations
C) UNINSTALL your programming environment
as some means to fix your problem? I guess it stops your program from crashing as you can no longer RUN it, or WORK on it, but really - could you have just run out screaming or something?
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
IT will be around for a long time. It seems the Carr believes IT is system administrators who run software they didn't write ... which is not true. Most decently sized companies that have IT shops have software engineers, sysadmins, QA, etc.. The closest replacements we have for those groups are things like SalesForce which are, to be nice, frustrating, inefficient, and poorly implemented closed source applications.
... IT will use these services. EC2 is nice to have to bring up temporary systems during heavy load but the end result will be like a lot of other helpful systems/tools: They will be used by IT where it makes sense. Business people need (or at least think they need) custom software as their work (or at least they think their work) is different than everyone else's. As long as they believe that they will need custom work done and can't use one sized fits all products.
You also end up with some of the same issues that have been plaguing SaaS providers: Who owns the data? What kind of liability is there for unplanned downtime or security breaches (are they an LLC??!?), How can lock in be avoided? etc...
Don't get me wrong
He also seems to be saying we will return back to the mainframe days in how users interact with systems. Come on, do people really want to stop their business if their dumb client(s) lose connection?
To be honest this is something that is partly being done today and not working out so well. It's called outsourcing. Lots of companies have attempted to outsource their code, infrastructure, testing, and business owners. The result has largely been disastrous. Making a one size fits all software "solutions" and structures and thinking it will overrun how companies get business done seems largely far fetched. I think lego programming will become a reality before the business user uses web browser/dumb terminals to do his or her work on a mainframe like cloud the same way their competitors do.
Obviously the first hurdle into this centralized environment will be a dramatic increase in bandwidth pipe everywhere (at a time when it seems that all future bandwidth will be soaked up by the music/video on demand businesses).
The second hurdle will be applications management. The computer utility companies will have to have every available software program ready for quick install, including the big names like Oracle. Recently when I looked in to outsourcing our Exchange servers I could find any hosting provider that could come near to our internal costs. Such a possibility will happen when Microsoft says it's time.
Example: a prof down the hall couldn't get her powerbook online for love or money. He's there fiddling with network prefs and having a Bad Day. I walk by on my way to the kitchen to get coffee.
"Hey Ralph: Mary here can't get online - somethings up with the prefs, and I've tried everything."
"Did you try making a new location?"
"Location - Ohh right - Duh. I forgot about that... I'll give it a whack. Thanks..."
A few minutes later she was surfing and Mike was, again, restored to his Godlike stature.
This allowed him to go back to his office and bury himself in setting up a new RAID for the video folks or deal with the ongoign nightmare of the online grading system which, even he agrees, is a complete POS. So we all commiserate.
We all love Mike, and we treat him VERY well. I know more than most of my cow-orkers what a tough job IT can be, and I do what I can to make sure he is always treated fairly and respectfully - he's a pro like the rest of us.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Carr is talking from the perspective of a user - not a technologist so when I see an article by someone qualified to make such predictions I'll pay more attention. He talks about distributed applications like google apps, which while they have their place for casual users I don't see any business trusting their sensitive business data to anyone outside their own fire walls and applications like Sales-force are already revealing the weakness in their business models. Distributed app's within a corporate intranet, yes - outside no, and more likely so open applications (i.e Open Office) will be employed first to negate licensing fees, and new models of developing applications we start to dominate.
Even if that was the only point I don't see any developments on the horizon that will decrease internet latency to a point where users won't notice the difference between a local and remote application and be annoyed by it. Four to ten users on one-pc yes, end of the pc no.
Before ousting the entire IT Department Carr has to realise that many businesses seek ways to increase their competitive advantage from within, i.e. once a business has their data systems that run their business mapped, they are likely to examine that to find ways to do business better. Thats why I.T departments exist, not because they are confined to a narrow "horizontal" everyone-uses-this-application view of the world but the "Vertical" hey-if-we-try-this we may be able to yield more return on our IT investment. Of course every competitive business has an IT Department, those who don't cannot compete. Business is war-like, you don't go out there ill-prepared.
The P.C will be a museum piece in 20 years, well DUUUUHH. In twenty years the amount of computing time in PC will make it well beyond any super-computer available today - so heres a prediction for you, it will be able to run thousands of distributed applications out to users whose workstations won't even look like what we have today and even those dumb workstations will be able to do ten times what a PC can do today - i.e everything will change, well who would have thought it. Puuuleeeeze, look at a 20 year old PC - you can't even do what you can do today, on it, without sacrificing massive amounts of usability. Back then they were predicting then end of the programmer, and I don't think that all of the algorithms that make up computer science have been discovered yet. So once that milestone is passed maybe such arrogant predictions can be made.
Humans are lazy, the more complicated the view of the world we have, the more complicated our information systems are to make sense of it. Presuming no immediate failure of our world systems that sustain us, I predict that nano-technology AND genetic engineering will increase the demand for programmers, and I haven't even started analysing the need for control systems to address global warming and energy efficiency initiatives that will become government requirements .
All up I think that Nick Carr can see a change on the horizon but that is the limit, he has gone out on a limb to say "it will mean this" because he doesn't have the imagination to extrapolate the actual possibilities. Thats ok, thinking is hard work, it's not for everyone. I won't be buying his book and instead of trying to make predictions about the future I'll just go about my business making my contribution to building it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Not yet, but give me time, I'm sure I can get them all.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
by those we work for.
We obsess about facts, and details, and truth. Because its really fuckin hard to fix shit without those things.
We abhor deception, vague generalities, and liers; i.e. generally speaking, the people we typically work for and the way they relate to us.
Naturally they would want to outsource us first chance they get.
Eventually they too will be outsourced, though.
And the only time we'll see them is when they bump into us at Walmart, saying, "Welcome to Walmart, how may I help you?"
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School
IT simply won't go away, people are looking at what these smaller companies are doing that are bringing to the personal users. Companies don't want to give up the security of knowing that their backups are current, their networks are secure, and that nobody else has access to their information except contractors working for them and their employees.
IT isn't just about providing access to resources, it's also about providing security for your company, providing support for users and their problems. IT will never go away, it'll change and grow in different, unimagined, directions. Companies don't want to give up security in exchange for spending less money, thats just stupid.
This article is crap.
My point was this, and I assume it is very common. When someone says "so and so is an IT God, guru, master, savior, etc." I assume that Mike and their ilk
are doing things like ensuring that patch Tuesday has not created a new hole in the network, they are opening up a new port on a firewall for someone's custom
app, and banging out a new logon script; usually in the first three hours of his/their day. For someone then to say "I have better things to do than fix my printer" (and
understand that I am reading into this, "my printer is jammed", "its out of toner", or "its working, I just can't make it print the way I want") is just plain insulting
and proves my point about what most non-technical users see.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Those that predicted that the PC would kill IT were wrong then, mainly beacuse the systems became more complex than simplified. It is possible for stuff to become simplified and then the IT department can be reduced. Perhaps never eliminated, but significantly reduced.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
am I going to "Control the processing of information directly"? I could, but in fact: Fuck No.
FTA:
"...once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud."
You forgot to account for the "cloud." Predictions indicate the "cloud" will be all-functional, wireless, and have perfect speech recognition (not like the bank IVRs that actually slow down the process of interacting with customer service).
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
I think you have it all wrong - everyone's doing it, because Pasteurization is the killer app of the dairy industry.
IT is dead, long live IT :)
From the header: when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same
His conclusions would be correct if this is actually what happened. But it isn't. Competitors don't magically "catch up" to each other. Can you walk into your favorite shoe store and get shoes delivered to your door the next day if they don't have the right size in stock? I know that I've tried, but to no avail. Of course, one company pulled this off like 5+ years ago, they just don't have any stores where I live. But their competitors are clearly not offering the service yet.
Anyone working in POS/Retail industry has seen the giant gaping chasm of technology differences between similar-sized vendors. You don't have to go too far before you meet one company with interactive Open-To-Buy and 6-month planning tools, whilst others are just fighting to run last year's sales reports.
Plus, there's the assumption that competitors can cost-effectively reproduce the solution. Non-compete contracts, patenting and various other legal backing can make this reproduction costly, difficult of even impossible.
Having been flooded by a defective pipe, I must say that a qualified plumber deserves respect as well. The problem is, you need a plumber's advice or a disaster to tell a good plumber from a bad one.
The same goes for IT.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
It will happen the same day they all remember ctrl-c is copy, and ctrl-v is paste.
I guess that's unlikely to happen before it's common to paste via middle-click and copy by just selecting the text.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
What you say is very true. Unfortunately proactive work, which can save companies thousands or even millions, or even save companies, is seldom appreciated by clueless bosses.
This ad space for rent.
As with Carr's previous article, he apparently his only experience is with a SMB style setup, where there are a few basic service - file sharing, e-mail and maybe an hosted CRM/ERP with a CMS for homepagee (acronym bingo!). What is often missed is value of competent advice, which is most often found in-house where somebody sees the operations daily and knows of frustrations by users.
I have found from time to time that users use work-arounds for problems and share those with everybody that completely violate either the purpose of the software or security aspects. Outsourced IT only obligation is to ensure that contracted services are running as defined in the agreement and nothing more. Internal IT departments often try to improve processes and solutions.
I myself favor a hybrid approach - outsource that which is routine maintenance - e.g. Groupware administration, server up-keep, network infrastructure, but have a competent CIO or sysadmin locally who sees the entire picture and can add value to the users by proposing and implementing such solutions that aid the core business.
That said, for an IT company everything above is almost irrelevant - an IT company that does not have skills to maintain their own infrastructure is often ill-guided.
Lone Gunmen crew.
Technology changes, peple are fired, same old Capitalism as Schumpeter's creative destruction however what will these huge datacentres be used for and who will manage them, who will manage the new SANs? Old jobs destroyed, new jobs created.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
More reactions than to a Linux / Apple / MS article? Seems that he really did hit a tender spot!
Now, wake up, IT as we know today is dead. How many IT persons today punch paper tape or cards or where is your data entry department? Or maybe you still take care of tape drives, vaults, etc? It has happened before, it will always happen.
Servers etc, you do external business, internet (see Akamai) has more power than you do. Or, maybe you are using external hosting or backed up to some external site, you are not the only customer. Or maybe you are using MS, SAP, Oracle, JBOSS or whatever solutions and consulting/support instead of your own, sorry to ask!
Security, maybe you use internet, banking network (a horror, SNA) or Reuter, trust those? NSA not spying? Local users are easy (as long as you can scan what they carry in their head out of work), remote users a small problem. Or maybe the "call home" systems to get updates and, of course, you know all other things they are doing? And the security is so much more what IT sees that it isn't even funny, when was last time your CEO, CIO, CTO walked to the server room without any control - trusted?, more later..
IT departments don't have to die but need to go back in time, be a profit center instead of be replaced by someone offering a cheap service. Take control of I in IT, Information. Forget the technology, it is and has always been easy, changing yes, but it is just technology you can either follow or develop. Information is different, it is your crown jewels, concentrate to that.
A little background to this opinion, it is just an opinion! I used to be, a long time ago, a systems programmer (in a very large corporate) who had the authority to sign very large contracts. How many programmers today have an authority to sign $5 million contract or any? I doubt not many. Now, of course I was responsible of the computing infrastructure, any programmers today have that? Or do you have 10 building construction and 5 electrical engineers in your group to take care of the infrastructure? So, times change, titles change, responsibilities change but every company will still have IT.
Plumbers, welders and electricians don't go to University to learn their trade.
With all due respect I think most IT people could do plumbing, welding or electrical work. The other way around is more debatable.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Although I didn't mean that virtualized and/or thin-client desktops were anything new. :-)
The question is about selling Citrix -- as-a-service. A cursory investigation reveals companies out there offering a managed virtualized desktop solution, but my impression is this is not a mature offering yet.
I expect the same companies that provide virtual Windows server hosting will be the ones that legitimatize it. Building on their centrally managed, patched and provisioned servers, they will expand into virtualized workstation/desktop offering once management tools make it cheap enough to sell in bulk to corporations needing a centralized solution for call centers, customer service, etc.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON