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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.
all the way down.
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.
... 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Linux on every desktop.