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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.
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.
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 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
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
... is new again. I've been centralized and decentralized multiple times.
This.
I once worked for a big company where all the bottom-rung departments were buying PCs and writing software to automate their work, while top-rung management was building a palace to house the new super-sized mainframe that was going to do everything for everyone. (And everyone was going to like it, whether they like it or not.)
I swear, some people make a good living pushing the beans back and forth across the table and declaring victory.
Ah, I always wondered what the B in MBA stood for.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.