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."

Comments

IT is as dead as the mainframe supercomputer

[falcon5768]

your heard it here first!

Re:Yeah - electricians are dead too

[Tom]

I think the book's author missed a step in his logic. The centralization of power utilities didn't obsolete electricians. He missed an even more important step: Electrical power is a simple, homogeneous commodity. IT isn't. You can't run a tube into someone's house and provide them with "IT". IT is more like the hundred of electrical devices we have in our homes than the power that's coming from the wall socket.

In this sense, the "IT" he speaks about are providers of basic services - hosting companies, ISPs, hardware leasing, etc. - well, we have all of them already.

Re:Depends on the Market

[Travoltus]

PCI? God help us all.

Outsourcing PCI = Mastercard information goes right to Al Qaeda, do not pass go, do collect $200 for Osama Bin Laden.

There's no amount of security that can save you once the admin overseas has been bribed a year's salary to cough up the goods - oh, and they're outside the FBI's jurisdiction, too. Their host country MIGHT get around to chasing the bastard down... if they like you at the time. Such is the joy of being at the mercy of another country to come to bat for you if you're wronged by one of their citizens.

So there will always be IT.

[twitter]

you can outsource whatever you like as long as you have the proper contractual language and the outsourcer takes appropriate action/care with the data.

You will always need someone like yourself to make sure things are "proper". There are things that lawyers don't know and those technical details makes a difference. You also need someone to deal with things that really can't be trusted outside the company.

You also need to maintain the physical plant, and it's here that the M$ people get angry because the author is really talking about them. Even while doing exactly the same tasks as a Unix shop, they require 5 times as many people but not all of those tasks are needed. People need computers, but they don't need the M$ upgrade train wreck. Most of the really needed tasks, like custom data analysis, can be done with any tool but are better done with free tools. Instead, people waste their time fighting M$'s formats and failures. IT will survive as a career path, but monkey boy patching and M$ specific crap is going to go as people escape the M$ monopoly.