What they are talking about is trying to automate IT to such a degree that there can be an order of magnitude reduction in IT staff.
As in: uh-oh, something changed in your business activity and your network needs to be rearranged. Some servers have to be taken off of one task and assigned to another. Lots of software needs to be reconfigured. Maybe you need to lease some additional servers for a little while and get them online quickly.
If you could do that mostly automagically, that saves on IT labor. If you could do that with the granularity of minutes or hours instead of months, then your IT labor looks like John Henry vs. the steam drill.
Is it a realistic plan? Hmm. Maybe. Realistically, it requires a lot of ISVs and platform providers to integrate with system management infrastructure --- and that's exactly what a bunch of them are working on. (Look at the Red Hat product roadmap for one example.)
The devil's in the details. There's an aweful lot of software to integrate to make it work and an aweful lot of aspects to that integration. Meanwhile, while it can save IT costs (in theory) -- it doesn't actually add any new _functionality_ to the software. In other words -- it will help someone like Amazon reduce their payroll, but it won't have the kind of impact that let Amazon introduce a whole new business model and corresponding growth.
I'd make an analogy to what's going on at my local grocery store. They took out 3 or 4 checkout lines (the kind staffed with a clerk and sometimes bagger) and replaced those with 4 self-checkout self-bagging "speed" lines (and one clerk that's supposed to watch all four and make sure nobody is stealing). "Productivity" increase without either job growth (job loss, actually) and without meaningful product improvement -- story of our times. (It's not even the case that using one of these speed checkouts gets you 15% off the cost of your groceries -- it's atually a degredation of the product.)
> They are outsourcing because they can get > the same work done for less money. Period. > As an employee you are a commodity, if you > can't distinguish functionally between 2 > commodities then the only discerning factor > becomes cost.
I can distinguish between those two commodities very easily. If I handsomely pay a team of _local_ drones, rather than a team of _very_far_away_ drones, then the average wages in my _local_ community go up.
When the average wages in my local community go up, then I live in a nicer place. There's better stores to shop at. Better restaurants to eat at. Less crime. Fewer jails. I can walk down the street to get a nice pastry at a nice cafe without feeling like I need a fucking bodyguard. I don't have a substantial portion of the population in my region who are _angry_ with me, personally, just because my face appears on the nightly news as a representative of the executive class.
And when my executive peers do like me, and _production_ in my region is diversified and flourishing -- now I can have great confidence that I live in a pretty secure and nice place no matter what the heck happens in international politics.
None of these incentives to pay the people around me actually matter, though, if I am so incredibly insulated from the real life going on in my surroundings that "Well, I can always flee to a tropical island" sounds like a good deal.
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What they are talking about is trying to automate IT to such a degree that there can be an order of magnitude reduction in IT staff.
As in: uh-oh, something changed in your business activity and your network needs to be rearranged. Some servers have to be taken off of one task and assigned to another. Lots of software needs to be reconfigured. Maybe you need to lease some additional servers for a little while and get them online quickly.
If you could do that mostly automagically, that saves on IT labor. If you could do that with the granularity of minutes or hours instead of months, then your IT labor looks like John Henry vs. the steam drill.
Is it a realistic plan? Hmm. Maybe. Realistically, it requires a lot of ISVs and platform providers to integrate with system management infrastructure --- and that's exactly what a bunch of them are working on. (Look at the Red Hat product roadmap for one example.)
The devil's in the details. There's an aweful lot of software to integrate to make it work and an aweful lot of aspects to that integration. Meanwhile, while it can save IT costs (in theory) -- it doesn't actually add any new _functionality_ to the software. In other words -- it will help someone like Amazon reduce their payroll, but it won't have the kind of impact that let Amazon introduce a whole new business model and corresponding growth.
I'd make an analogy to what's going on at my local grocery store. They took out 3 or 4 checkout lines (the kind staffed with a clerk and sometimes bagger) and replaced those with 4 self-checkout self-bagging "speed" lines (and one clerk that's supposed to watch all four and make sure nobody is stealing). "Productivity" increase without either job growth (job loss, actually) and without meaningful product improvement -- story of our times. (It's not even the case that using one of these speed checkouts gets you 15% off the cost of your groceries -- it's atually a degredation of the product.)
> They are outsourcing because they can get
> the same work done for less money. Period.
> As an employee you are a commodity, if you
> can't distinguish functionally between 2
> commodities then the only discerning factor
> becomes cost.
I can distinguish between those two commodities very easily. If I handsomely pay a team of _local_ drones, rather than a team of _very_far_away_ drones, then the average wages in my _local_ community go up.
When the average wages in my local community go up, then I live in a nicer place. There's better stores to shop at. Better restaurants to eat at. Less crime. Fewer jails. I can walk down the street to get a nice pastry at a nice cafe without feeling like I need a fucking bodyguard. I don't have a substantial portion of the population in my region who are _angry_ with me, personally, just because my face appears on the nightly news as a representative of the executive class.
And when my executive peers do like me, and _production_ in my region is diversified and flourishing -- now I can have great confidence that I live in a pretty secure and nice place no matter what the heck happens in international politics.
None of these incentives to pay the people around me actually matter, though, if I am so incredibly insulated from the real life going on in my surroundings that "Well, I can always flee to a tropical island" sounds like a good deal.