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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'm a QSA (PCI authorized auditor), and have done several PCI audits over the last year. I disagree with your statement; 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. I have submitted multiple Reports On Compliance in which the business utilized outsourcing and had the report accepted by the card brands. Same thing for shared systems - its all a matter of doing so in the proper manner.
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
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
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
Funny I have clients what outsource there PCE to PCI certified hosting providers. Really it's not much different that the way paypal works they never know the customers card data they just get a UID from that provider and pass that back to them whenever they need to charge or credit anything. It makes it past a PCI audit and since the provider themselves has been independently audited and insured it makes the companies have a warm fuzzy that they don't have any direct exposure.
No sir I dont like it.
"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.
Of course PCI specs could change or your company/the industry decides to move away from PCI. Then the problem is right back.
Regardless, this guy is only partially correct.
Correct: Computing data is similar to electric power generation in that it will be increasingly centralized.
Incorrect: The jobs are just gonna disappear.
In his example, he forgot that there's not just one guy running the power plant up the street. He also forgot the need for power strips, backup generators, batteries for portable goods, stores to sell the batteries, power strips, etc, and of course, your friendly neighborhood electrician.
In other words, yes, there's a shitload of centralization, but it still takes a lot of jobs to get electricity into the consumer's hands. Computing will be no different.
Payment Card Industry https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/ - Data handling standards for CC data.
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
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
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.
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!
The problem with outsourcing things like the IT department is that as long as it's part of the business the IT people is "always" there - and they can do some other minor jobs too if they have time. And usually problems are fixed relatively fast. (but not always documented)
In an outsourced environment the user has to log a case and then wait for the outsourced IT department to pick it up. This IT department is probably reduced in personnel compared to the business IT department which means that there will always be a queue. And when the outsourced IT department guy finally shows up he can take a look and say - OH! - That's not an IT department problem - that's a XXX problem and we don't do these... Usually the outsourced IT departments are drained of competence too so you will get the guy with maybe some obscure MS certification but no experience in the business to try to solve your problem.
And it doesn't matter what your agreements with the outsourcing company says - the competence goes down and the overhead of the operation goes up when you outsource.
As a result - don't try to measure your IT department by the means of productivity on their part. If you see them sitting down relaxing - relax - there are no problems. If you can't find them - start to worry. If they are running like hell - it's panic time. See the IT department as the fire department for computer management - they may show up from time to time to do some proactive work. Proactive work usually doesn't look like much - but it may actually make a difference when something happens because at that time they probably know every corner of the building better than most people.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I'm a QSA (PCI authorized auditor), and have done several PCI audits over the last year
Great, can you swing by tommorrow around 9 AM? I'm having some trouble with my sound card.
"Outsourcing" - I do not think that word means what you think it means
Outsourcing != Off-Shoring
Sure, you have to be careful with sending your data to other countries, especially where your home nation doesn't have legal extradition. But don't paint the whole idea of outsourcing with that brush...
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
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!")
Outsourcing is basically a gamble on the truth of the following inequation
R + I > R + P + O + E
R = Required: Cost of work required to do the job in the best way with maximum efficiency
I = Internal: Extra cost due to effort required by Internal staff to accomplish task due to incompetence or inexpertise
P = Profit: External party's (outsourcee) required profit to do the work. ie. The contractor's cut.
O = Overhead: Extra management cost of outsourcing for both the outsourcer and the outsourcee.
E = External: Extra cost due to effort required by External (outsourced) staff to accomplish task due to incompetence or inexpertise
In other words you're gambling that the company you're outsourcing your work to is so much more competent than your own people that even after they've made a handsome profit and after you've paid the overhead to manage the relationship you'll still be ahead paying for the outsourcee's solution.
Now sometimes outsourcing is a good gamble. For example economies of scale in manufacturing mean you'd never ever want to produce 100 office staplers yourself. Forget for a second that your core business isn't making staplers, think of the cost of tooling when producing 100 vs 10 million. Similarly for software no company is going to write their own word processor when there are feature rich off the shelf packages out there.
However for most custom work where a business wants to and is large enough to do things their own way, even if it's not your core business, unless you're going to leverage external expertise (or a code base) that you don't have in house or won't need for long (and therefore can't afford to hire and manage) P + O + E will be much greater than I. Unless of course your in house staff is nonexistent or so brain dead it needs to be replaced.
I understand that I've oversimplified above, but what I don't understand is why people high up in the decision making structure in big business don't understand it even this well. It shouldn't require huge textbooks and research to understand this.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer