Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Will IT Departments Look Like In 5 Years?
Lucas123 writes "As consumerization of IT and self-service trends becomes part and parcel of everyone's work in the enterprise, the corporate data center may be left behind and IT departments may be given over to business units as consultants and integrators. 'The business itself will be the IT department. [Technologists] will simply be the enabler,' said Brandon Porco, chief technologist & solutions architect at Northrop Grumman. Porco was part of a four-person panel of technologists who participated at a town hall-style meeting at the CITE Conference and Expo in San Francisco this week. The panel was united on the topic of the future of IT shops. Others said they are not sure how to address a growing generation gap between young and veteran workers, each of whom are comfortable with different technologies. Nathan McBride, vice president of IT & chief cloud architect at AMAG Pharmaceuticals, said he's often forced to deal with older IT workers coming on board who expect his company to support traditional email like Outlook when it uses Google Apps.' Sooner or later, IT departments are going to change. When do you think that will happen, and how will they be different?"
We still support systems that are going on 30 years old. What's the big deal about 5 years from now? Is this question being asked by the same people that predicted flying cars would happen years ago?
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
all the way down.
Someone that signs up for google professional accounts. Whoop fucking do!
Nice they we know his company's entire communications is available to the US government, and any other "law" agency. Won't be long until an underling will be selling secrets, or hacked by a rival via an overseas network.
"As consumerization of IT and self-service trends becomes part and parcel of everyone's work in the enterprise..."
Then nobody will ready whatever comes after it... just fyi...
There are IT departments and there are IT departments.
The 'pretend' IT departments that shouldn't have existed in the first place and are all caught up in the 'cloud' and 'trends' will become something new because they never should have existed in the first place.
The 'real' IT departments will carry on lifting the heavy loads and making data work, as they have been since the days of COBOL and punched cards.
From the way young pups talk you'd think computers were just invented in the last 5 years.
Now get off of my cloud.
Sooner or later, IT departments are going to change. When do you think that will happen, and how will they be different?"
*Shakes Magic 8 ball*
"Reply hazy try again"
Well, there you have it.
... is new again. I've been centralized and decentralized multiple times. I swear, some people make a good living pushing the beans back and forth across the table and declaring victory. There will always be economies of scale for centralization of shared services and there will always be techies with some level of intimacy with the business to support their applications and communicate requirements. The fact that self-service IT continues to grow simply reinforces the need for champions/advocates at the business level that help requesters pick and choose their products from a service catalog. At the end of the day, Joe User couldn't care less where his services reside.
IT is already being shattered. But don't assume this is a good thing. All thats actually happening is massive damage, loss of control, and data being islanded. Whole departments and even orgs will spin out and data spiral arms will spin out.
The primary old school reasons for IT departments - these still exist. You might well think regulation, and compliance have simply gone away. They haven't, they just got forgotten.
One thing being forgotten, is that IT has always been capable of game changing. Always. But what you find is this is usually killed by lack of funding, and by severe red tape. The idea that end around onto the nearest cloud makes you fast moving - is true. But its also usually arbitrary, and outside of operational agreement in many cases.
People assuming that everyone on BYOD and every device under the sum being an out of control compromised, un policied device as a good thing. It will be, for a short time. Until the damage happens.
As for older techs who don't or cant stay up to speed - whats new? Thats not a new IT problem. Thats ever present. Part of the idea of google docs is that to a greater degree - you don't need IT..(at least thats the theory... )
We`re all equal
that the terminology will change again? that happens every several years anyway, more or less.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
it's already happening..
it departments are becoming phone numbers to underpaid, overworked workers at call center sweat shops in asia that support outsourced services hosted oversold, under-supported, exploitable, hackable, and snoopable "clouds"
In my opinion, any business that depends on Google Apps will end up one of two ways.
A division of google.
Out of business.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Moving to IaaS or SaaS solutions results in reduced labor costs. Yes you still need someone to administer those solutions, but you're cutting links out of the chain. With IaaS you no longer have someone managing a server room. With SaaS you no longer have a sys admin running and patching the OS. If that's all you do, then there's a good chance you're going to be made redundant by someone over at Google or Amazon or Microsoft who is doing your job for thousands of companies instead of a single company.
Learn IaaS and SaaS solutions or hope you have enough saved to retire.
5 years is from now it will be about time to migrate the COBAL servers to IPv6 right? We need to keep the reachable!
A company whose IT is run in silos usually end up paying more for less. That being said, IT should become a service unto itself. Small and Medium size companies should be able to get third parties into an agreement. I think that this makes more sense. Even when it comes down to matters of security, these companies can ensure they get a properly bonded and vetted IT support team as a third party via contract.
A: Empty.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Consumerization and what the end users are using to access corporate data has little to do with the backend systems.
MS Exchange, Sharepoint, document management systems, backups systems, web servers, "content" systems, video/audio systems, portals, phone systems etc are not running on someones handheld or a small server someone is running under their desk. Very few people in the business (even people in the support levels of IT) have very little idea how complex those systems are and the engineering that goes into to keeping them running efficiently. Most companies think if you are not out walking around showing your face fixing a printer for someone, you must not be useful or doing anything.
I work in a public school, so my perspective is somewhat screwed up...
That said, I see our department focused more on infrastructure in 5 years (i.e. cabling, switches, routers, wireless AP's, etc.). The PC's, the servers, the applications...they're all moving to the cloud for us. And with BYOD proliferating, the devices are privately owned, not school owned. With the advent of Google Apps for Education and other SaaS the students and staff share electronic documents rather than print them, so printer use and support has even declined.
A office tucked away in some forgotten corner of the office, piled high with the decaying remains of numerous upgrade projects and spare parts. A couple bored men dressed in business casual spend their days browsing Slashdot on suspiciously well-built computers. Occasionally one answers his phone for a short conversation that sounds remarkably like "is it plugged in?"
that i have been doing it
we still have servers, we still have data centers. we still have people trying to take our data and processes and lock it up for themselves. except now its called "the cloud"
in the 1990's we had application service providers that rented out virtual desktops in the days of $2000 desktop PC's. these failed and they were ebaying their EMC and Cisco gear for years.
now we have "the cloud" which does pretty much the same thing. the cloud is awesome for smaller companies like this AMAG company with only 189 people. large companies still have servers and data centers. I don't know where it is but at some point in your employee count it makes sense to run your own infrastructure rather than rent it out. the cloud and renting can actually be a lot more expensive than buying your own hardware which is fairly cheap.
google apps are nice but Exchange does things that gmail cannot do
The technology will change but I don't see the administrator changing. Just like modern code monkeys mirror there counter parts from 30 years ago, modern day administrators mirrors the old guys who started networking. The system doesn't change, the technology does.
This isn't nearly as complicated as the self-interested "consultants" are making it out to be. Strip away the marketdroid-speak and the cloud-hype verbiage, and all it's really saying is that IT will have to pay more attention to actual business needs. Anyone with their eyes open has already known that for years.
Yes, the stereotypical BOFH doesn't have much of a future. Good riddance. In fact, BOFHs are already almost extinct, because they don't add much value to the business. Successful companies work with IT to find ways that IT resources can be used to make the company better and more productive, rather than having IT as a roadblock or setting them up as the "computer janitors". You don't really need an expensive consultant to tell you any of this (though in poorly-run companies, you might need one to get the management to listen).
Large corporate environments chance at a glacial speed. If anything, they merely add, never subtract - the proportion of Fortune 1000 companies which have mission-critical mainframes is close to 100%, as it has been for the past 50 years. Similarly, pretty much all of them still have a VAX or AS/400 similar mini-computer running something critical. The waves of consultant-pushed fads wash over these institutions with virtually no effect. They all run small "incubator" tech-evalutation groups so they can sort out which of the new tech is likely to produce useful ROI, but the actual adoption rates of these new techs is very slow.
Mid-sized companies are pretty similar, though they're a bit more aggressive with dumping older technology. They don't generally replace it with cutting edge stuff, though, since that's a huge risk they don't want to take. Pretty much every "tech upgrade" I've ever seen in this space is replacing a 30-year-old setup with a design which first showed up a decade before. Mid-sized companies go for solidly-proven tech.
Little companies are where the most change happens, for the good and bad. The bad side is that many small companies don't have the expertise to handle the adoption of new processes and tech properly, and thus screw it all up, and then kill the company. I've seen this happen at both small tech AND non-tech companies, where an insufficiently funded/staffed/knowledgable IT "department" killed the company. Literally. The good is that small companies are where the experimentation happens, and, particularly in tech-oriented ones, it's where the next wave of computing is really prototyped then refined.
The general answer to the article is that any sane company's IT department will look 90% identical to what it is now in 10 years, and even in 50 years will almost certainly still be at least 50% identical. For those able to handle the risk, things will chance on a decade-by-decade basis; but, the reality is, those companies will either have died or turned into mature (and risk adverse) companies by then. So, while the small company space is a place of rapid change in IT, at a specific company, a period of rapid evolution will be followed either by death of the company, or evolution to the long-term stability type.
The short of it is: NEVER trust a consultant trying to predict the future for you. Particularly if they're extrapolating on "new" tech.
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
noticed it around 2004. that year IM was hyped like crazy in the Enterprise tech media. it was going to replace email. dozens of IM products were released that year. come next year no one cared about it.
the cloud thing seems to have lasted longer but no one seems to know exactly what it is. at first the public cloud was going kill corporate IT and everyone was going to outsource everything for a low monthly payment. the next year people figured out it was BS so they made up the private cloud label. suddenly every server in your datacenter is part of this cloud thingy. services are provisioned magically and no need to worry about lack of CPU/RAM or IO. you just provision as you need.
now its BYOD. some companies will emrace it, others won't. depends on the organization and the line of business.
but ignore the hype in the media. it changes every year depending on what is being shown at the trade shows
more centralised management of everything.
Why have three DBAs managing a single database when you can have 10 managing a 1,000?
Managed print services, Office online, more or less disposable laptops, cloud email, cloud active directory services etc.. etc...
There are too many people doing the jobs only a few are really needed for.
I think this centralisation will be bloody unfortunate for most of us.
We're just now finishing our upgrades to SQL Server 2008, so I imagine five years from now we'll be finishing upgrading to 2012.
Standardization and merger/monopoly are happening in IT and in business.
How many products do you see that do everything. We have a forms package that does work flow and web design, a document program that does workflow and web design, we have a messaging layer that does work flow and web design. Each trying to capture the entire business. We see it with hamburger chains and doughnut sellers going after Startbuck's market. Now we see McDonalds going after Dairy Queens market and big box discount stores going after the Grocery chain market.
Everyone wants to be a one stop shop. Companies are getting there by buying up smaller companies and over and over.
The problem is the actual software developers will have fewer and fewer jobs for real development with few and fewer companies providing software.
Already our company is into buying packages and thinking they can save money by plugging everything together instead of targeted custom development.
The IT people of the future (if this trend continues) will be glorified plumbers. A few developers will make the design decision we will all have to live with.
Unless of course we start to recognize that this may not be the most cost effective way to do things, or that this dumbing down of jobs is bad overall for the society and we might see some anti-trust going on with breaking up of the swelling blobs of companies and packages and a new leaner meaner model emerging.
Who knows?
IT departments will look like that. IT is just one big TPS forever.
Not so much if you're somewhat older and you've seen the IT wheel turn more than a few times and come back to where it started.
What will the IT department look like in five years?
Well, there's going to be the guy with the beard and suspenders, and the guy with the "wacky" sense of humor, and they may be the same guy. Then you're going to have the angry guy who seems to know how to do only one thing, but it's something way important, and he does it incredibly well. Then there's the woman who stares at you blankly whenever you talk to her, but seems to have absorbed what you were trying to say anyhow. You will also have the really smart guy who can't seem to get any aspect of his life together, but seems to know everything about everything if you need to ask him anything. There's going to be the very stylish and personable guy who calls you "broham", and it's going to drive you nuts when it turns out he's pretty good at his job, because no fair, right? And the very nice person who can't figure out how to work the badge reader, nevermind anything he's supposed to be working on, but everyone likes him anyway. There's also going to be a kid fresh out of college who's sure she knows how everything works, and will break everything at least once trying to prove it, usually when your users are busiest. You will send her out to look for a wireless cable tester at least once, and then tell her it's an app she can download, she should search for it on google. Then there's the guy who never seems to be at his desk, never answers the phone and is never available in IM, but all his tickets get resolved with no follow up customer complaints. And there's also the woman who will do whatever a customer wants, no matter how stupid, and everyone hates her. Plus, everyone will fly jet-packs to work.
I'm a developer, not an administrator, so I know little of these early '80s mini-computers of which you speak. However, their continued use is kind of interesting to me. Is it difficult to fix or replace these machines if they break? And if so, would it be possible/useful for a vendor to port these legacy OSes to run in a virtual machine on today's commodity hardware? Obviously such a port would be costly, but I wonder which costs less -- keeping a line of mini-computers in low-volume production, or porting the whole legacy OS to today's hardware? (The third possibility is to retire the antique system, but if that has not already been done, presumably it's because the cost of migration is worse than the risk of the system going toes-up some day.)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Because not for anything if you want to use Outlook to get you gmail it's simple as gmail does IMAP! The horrors! Pretty easy to setup on my phone too. And I'm an older I.T. worker.
Expect to rent most of your software just like you pay for Netflix. Rents might be low, but you'll pay.
And expect surveillance as a service too. Interestingly, everyone used to think I was a conspiracy nut when when I told them this.
I hate being right.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
...is to ensure a "paper trail" for management and formal communications. Everyone loves to IM.
... nuff said.
It will look exactly like they do today.
I walked by our IT department today and it looked exactly like they did 15 years ago at any company I worked at. A bunch of open PC's with parts and wires dangling out of them, a bunch of server racks in the never ending process of being upgraded, a bunch of obsolete parts strewn over shelves and desks, boxes of wires old keyboards and mice in the corner, old monitors and brick thick laptops that once cost a fortune now collecting dust because nobody knows how to get rid of them.
The actual server room is a way too cold room filled with racks of mismatched components from HP and Dell and homegrown solutions humming noisily away, the acrid smell of ozone and general neglect filling the air.
The eclectic collection of socially challenged uber-nerds that usually fill IT department staff, walking around with whatever phone was released just last week and squirreling all the best workstation tech for themselves..
You can walk into any "enterprise" IT department and see the exact same thing, over and over and over again.
All the "cloud" has done for the world is given consumers a place to store pictures of their cat's and access to music they would have otherwise (or already have) stolen. It has allowed people with a guilty conscience to stream movies and TV shows on demand for a low monthly fee.
For enterprise, Cloud is just another buzzword that IT managers love to throw around but the non-IT corporate execs will never let their company's intellectual property reside on some external 3rd party storage server.
All that will change is that in 5 years that room full of shitty server components will be called the "cloud" room, and no longer the "server" room us ol' timers call it. Every enterprise will try and build their own local "cloud" to try and remain hip to the lingo of the era.
Of course in 5 years nobody will use the terminology "Cloud" anymore. Either it will become Cloud 2.0 or Web Infinity or some kind of shit like that.
But the IT department will remain steadfast and unchanged.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
In 5 years: What's an IT department?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Every dollar consumed by a "resource" is a dollar an executive doesn't get as a bonus. First in-house business programming was dumped for vertical-market packages. The AS/400s are gone, the departmental programs are gone. The people who did it got big bonuses, and they're gone, leaving whoever is there now to pick up the pieces and hire consultants for Lawson, Hogan, and a million other vertical-market packages you've never heard of. The next frontier will be outsourcing to the cloud. I saw yesterday that Amazon is offering database access as a service - no need to employ that SQL Server DBA. The DBA is the one person management hasn't figured out how to get rid of, since most vertical-market packages use it. When a manager thinks this through, and realizes the potential to reduce headcount, the vendors of vertical-market packages will be pressured to use cloud databases. I see this as the next frontier. Just as there are too many IT guys chasing too few jobs now, in 5 years there will be too many SQL Server DBAs chasing too few jobs.
So the future looks like today, only moreso - CONSOLIDATION. A few big datacenter players will achieve an economy of scale and require very few employees to manage very many servers. The same will be true for DBAs - once a DBA has tuned a database for a vertical-market package, the same tuning can be used over and over. Programming in general will be consolidated with vertical-market vendors, who need a few domain experts and not much else.
I see IT shrinking until it doesn't exist as a separate entity. With disposable technology, you don't need repairs done. Buildings are already wired for networking. Support almost doesn't exist any longer in a BYOD world.
The days of a career in IT or software development may be coming to an end in 5 years.
Now, add 5 years of mold growth to the cioffee pot and you've got it.
At the moment it seems to me that many companies are moving things into the cloud, and often the traditional IT department is outsourced at the same time - or perhaps a little bit later. So, in 5 years a lot of IT departments will look rather empty.
The reason behind this is that the idea about putting things in the cloud looks compelling, since it promises things like savings and convenience. And the outsourcing will happen, because once your stuff is in the cloud, it will be administered remotely anyway, using tools like Chef or Puppet, so they might as well save on expensive on-shore staff.
This strategy may well backfire, though. When you outsource, you may be giving away your core assets - your data - to an unknown entity, in the hope that a contract will be all that is required to make it work. To me it looks a bit like winging it on a prayer.
I am not trying to spread unreasonable FUD here, but there are some real issues that should be thought through by those in charge. Regrettably, even quite clever people somehow tend to distrust the persons they know well, while being perfectly willing to trust a complete stranger.
I don't know that they will look that different in five years. In ten years or so I think IT departments might not exist at all. The networking types will be in the maintenance department. Other departments will have their own "analysts", or whatever, who will handle the more intricate data integration issues. Software and storage will be leased and will be offsite. Custom programming, as we traditionally understand it, will be practically unheard of. Any special apps will be created by the aforementioned "analysts".
At any rate, I intend to be retired by then. It is up to the next generation to decide how they want to work.
Proverbs 21:19
This is how I envision IT departments to look like in 5 years: http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091115174643/memoryalpha/en/images/f/f2/USS_Enterprise_(alternate_reality)_bridge.jpg
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Linux on every desktop.
I spent 15 years being the IT staff for a small marketing company. Last November they decided to save a ton of money and outsource IT, which is working ok for them. They have some issues which will now never be resolved (like form letters with wrong contact names hard-coded into them), but on the whole they can work with the slowly self-crippling mess they have. It's worth the hassle for the savings, and the cheaper, outsourcing people will at least keep it running.
For them, it's all about money... and they aren't unique by any stretch. The days of the small IT shop, or the lone IT guy are fast coming to an end. Microsoft's push to kill the PC (aka Windows 8) isn't helping matters either.
I'll probably end up doing something in manufacturing or agriculture instead of IT now. It'll be fun and interesting, I'm sure.
If you derive some strategic advantage over your competition from your processes, you will want to keep those close to your management chain. If your processes are standard things like payroll, a public web page, etc. then you derive little advantage by rolling your own. Let the consultants come in and lay their standard template on your organization. You can benefit from their broader view of your markets as well as best business practices in general.
IMO, the biggest mistake that companies make is to invite the consultants in with the idea that they will be adapting your proprietary process knowledge to some application service. They might smile and nod a lot when you tell them what you want. But in the end, their job is to convince you to adopt the standard process already encoded into their product suite. Fight that and your SAP or Salesforce migration will fail miserably.
Have gnu, will travel.
There won't be many in-house IT teams, anymore. You'll have a few severely overworked, stressed "DevOps" guys that do everything from printer maintenance to screaming at the cloud vendors, but no real in-house infrastructure.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
They tend to get people for the panels who think in a similar fashion. The 1 person who organizes the speakers can easily fail to find or even recognize the full range of diversity of experts - plus they have to actually show up. Some will go into a herd mentality on topics that they don't feel as strongly about VS the credentials of the others.
To the MBAs running business, IT is a resented burden that adds OVERHEAD. This opinion is near universal at this point. The building janitors are in the same boat but they cost less and when robotics gets better... out go the janitors! (if not already replaced with illegal immigrants on the excuse that "Natives don't want THOSE jobs.")
Without changes to the culture, it is quite clear where the future of IT will be-- right next to the janitors of today. Cleaning services are often used over an in house staff; IT services will be similar and in many places they are at least partially.
Internet services (AKA the naturally innocuous soft fluffy "Cloud") not only gives a false sense of stability/security, but it removes the related support services. No longer pay per-computer fees or deal with a site license, just subscribe and never deal with that again! It's like your cell phone you LOVE to get for free with your 3 year contract you gladly pay 4x as much for as your land line (which costs more to maintain.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Really??? Is anyone going to be listening to these folks?? "Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise (CITE)" isn't exactly Gartner which sadly is who most large IT shops take queues from.
Karma: Bad
This is stated as if it's an axiom. I'm not going to opine on whether it's true or not, since I'm not sure what the blinking heck it's supposed to mean.
But the whole article falls flat on its arse if its major premise turns out to be a load of old bollocks, don't you think?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
I guess life is nice and uneventful when people right dumb articles like these. Cloud will not take over the world, thanks to privacy issues. Microsoft Lync will still be laughed at in telecom/communications circles. Snore.
Security will be a greater concern and IT departments start to use GNU/Linux more (as they should). And more virtualization. That's it. Enjoy your weekend.
Clueless bean counters and/or middle manglers will assume that if it costs less, it must be better.
Until of course, their business trails off, the finger pointing starts, the company re-orgs to bury the bodies, everyone runs for the exits and the bankruptcy lawyers start rising from their graves, searching desperately for brains.... and finding none.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Programmer time is getting cheaper than maintaining the expensive mainframes those apps run on. Meanwhile remote assistance tools work. Best Buy used to have 30 guys on staff per store for geek squad. Now it's 3. 2 guys to plug computers in so the offshore guys can fix it and one guy to drive around picking up and dropping off fixed computers in his snazzy Geek Squad VW beetle. I know so many techs who always told themselves: If all else fails I can work at Geek Squad. Well... you can't.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Lousy because I won't be here doing the effing great job I've done in this one for the past 18 years.
IPv6 will be so far along it will be literally awesome.
Now it might not have majoriy share but there will be organizations transitioning over nearly everywhere you look...
and it works _very_ well there. So much so that an $8/hr "IT" rep can admin it just fine. Especially when his wages have been plummeting for 30 years. AD & LDAP are 1000x more reliable than in the WinNT days and most companies don't need a full time tech anymore. Those large scale racks mean economies of scale and fewer employees needed to manage it all.
Basically, IT's changing a lot. As the hardware/software gets better It's going away.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The difference now is that the 'cloud' lets you hire the cheapest labor to manage it the world offers. As an IT support rep you compete on the global market for your job, but the Capital that owns the infrastructure is global. They're not competing the way Wage Slaves are. Meanwhile the top 1% of the 1% is gunning for those CIO's salaries. Finally Big Data makes all that waste stand out, and cheap offshore accountants crunch the numbers to track it down and eliminate it. IT is being made cheap & disposable, just like IT workers.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
you're laboring under the misconception that anyone who matters still competes and still takes risks. The 1% own 40% of everything, and they're working on the other 60%. So what if Company A steals from Company B if the Koch Brothers own both of them?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
A real apprenticeship system or PHD needed for level 1 help desk.
bunk beds, chicken-fenced rooftops, maybe a moat and crocs.
As the NSA has a direct line into Google and can read whatever they like, any sane corporation will be pulling all of their data back into their local IT departments where it will be much safer from the whims of government jack-booted thugs acting at the whim of whoever's in power at the moment (see IRS/Tea Party scandal).
Same as today: Actively considering every method that could be an alternative to providing IT support by hiring intelligent, well-educated and well-informed people. Because that would be unthinkable.
I don't think the business will be its own IT department. I do know that we in the business are today already hiring our own consultants to provide the IT support that we actually need.
(Joke)
A department of the NSA.
Management: IT is expensive - we can save money by OUTsourcing.
5 years later...
Management: IT is expensive - we can save money by INsourcing. ...
5 years later, Go to line 1
Those of us who've been in IT for a while have seen this cycle through a few times.
After much reflection, I conclude that there is no such thing as competent management.
Very few companies have figured out that outsourcing causes more problems then it fixes. Most just see the shortterm savings. I doubt this will have reversed itself in 5 years.
Hell, most companies haven't fixed the idiocies that lead to the econopocalypse; we can't exactly expect the best from someone considered so inconsequential as IT, (how many companies actually treat IT as important?)
A real apprenticeship system or PHD needed for level 1 help desk.
I want to thank you for repeating your post in your subject, because we are all far too thick to understand your point without having it repeated to us. Poorly.
I'm thinking it will look a lot like getting blamed when you don't have enough employees/resources to do it right, or ignored for doing it right in spite of that. Never understood how you guys put up with it. IT should've been the new "postal" by now.
Now that CIOs and CEOs are starting to lose their jobs because of breaches,...
Can you provide citations of CEOs that have lost their jobs because of data breaches. I've yet to hear of such a case. CIOs, maybe. CEOs, I call BS.
There may be differences between the continents here but at least in Europe I don't see a future with enough staff to warrant an IT department. Consider that most of the stuff we do today are actually being done by computers: robotic assembly in industry, online retail, digital video workflow in journalism & entertainment, online learning, learning algorithms on big data replacing analysts with spreadsheets, bureaucracy moving from people to algorithms and databases with web front-ends, hell even driverless cars replacing taxis and goods transports. We will need the "common Joe" to be as proficient with a computer as the baseline in any IT shop today. Sure for old companies stuck in the pre-internet world that have to answer phones, do spreadsheets and carry crates - there will be a place for an IT shop but a company starting up today has to vacuum up the able people so IT shops in old companies will experience brain drain. If you start a company today and think you need a fax-machine, a printer, a mail-server, a laptop per employee with the office on it - you are looking at it the wrong way. Hell if you need employees you are probably not thinking it through. Sure history is cyclical. Everything will happen again. But the internet and the huge dent it has made on every possible business out there - we are just seeing the start of a transition to another way of structuring companies. People say that "ze cloud" is too expensive for IT. That might be true for an old shop. But if you don't have whitespace, techies, cables, a good power deal, servers or even a building - that's a hefty price tag right there to get to a place where scaling the sucker is an even bigger investment. Buying IaaS and SaaS makes sense in the same way as not creating your own electricity and not building your own servers. Things are going to change but for most people it just means being employed somewhere else doing the same thing but for more customers.
If you can't run a service cheaper in house, you need new management. Simple fact is that the value propositions for outsourcing to save money just don't exist. If you have a clue of how to evaluate, what to consider, and questions to ask, it quickly becomes obvious that the "savings" are a shell game designed around short sighted decisions and incomplete cost center evaluations with the purpose of the proposer getting a large bonus at the completion of the outsourcing rather then the success of the overall outsourcing contract.
Unless you totally have no trained people on hand. It makes sense to outsource "minor" fields, that are not your competence. In a smallish IT firm I would, without a hesitation, outsource legal, accounting or travel. This is until you are large enough to hire a half a dozen people that work in that field, but then you are not a smalish company anymore.
I see many problems with inhouse "cost centers", not in their actual efficiency but int he accounting model used to evaluate their cost. If you get bill for storage by the MB other departments will not want to use the bare minimum and try to go though loopholes (buying their own infrastructure) to reduce their cost. But in the case of storage the people running the servers are the most expensive bit, a few drives extra cost peanuts in comparison. Many of these type of cost models incentiveise the wrong thing resulting in inefficiently running departments. Outsourcing does not help much, since they almost always provide a whose service, but their are "cheaper", in that you actually pay less.
5 years from now, Lotus Notes v10.3 will **STILL** suck, and brain-dead corporations will still be forcing their unfortunate employees to use it.