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."

Re:Depends on the Market

[mrhandstand]

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.

Re:Depends on the Market

[silas_moeckel]

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.

Re:IT Career Path?

[Bandman]

Interesting, but the two people you mention were both the business geniuses rather than the technical people in those companies. If it weren't for Paul Allen, we'd probably never have heard of Bill Gates, and the same goes for Woz.

Re:lack of disadvantage is advantage

[Otter]

Actually early adopters will simply improvie their operational effectiveness in relation to the competition, this is not the same as strategic advantage...

Terminology aside, Carr's whole point is that the advantages of first adopters do not outweigh the added costs, wrong choices and time spent on cultivating "vision" and "alignment" relative to companies who wait for a consensus to emerge and then make their investment. He certainly doesn't "ignore" the issue.

Re:Depends on the Market

[mrhandstand]

Payment Card Industry https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/ [pcisecuritystandards.org] - Data handling standards for CC data.

Re:Depends on the Market

[mrhandstand]

A payment gateway might take a % of each transaction they process on your behalf (think PayPal)...1% of 5 billion transactions can add up fast.

Half a decade later, and still an idiot

[swordgeek]

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?

I read the book

[wheatking]

and all he means is IT = Internet Technology and believes that cloud based service of various kinds are as big of a change as the Electricity grid was... what that means for IT personnel is simply that the challenges and solutions CHANGE - they dont disappear - they merely (will) appear in a difference place.

Re:Don't believe it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I run the "IT Department" for a 50-person company. Here's why I think the author is absolutely correct: Racking a server is the only thing we haven't been able to automate.

The introduction of Amazon EC2 has been demonstrated that it IS possible to programmatically deploy compute instances, while leveraging the provider's economy of scale. Let Amazon invest in computer-racking robots -- we'll just write some code to instantiate server instances when we need them.

As it stands, we've already written software to generate and deploy installation images with the latest software. Configuration files are automatically deployed based on the machine type, user accounts and SSH keys are automatically distributed using LDAP. *Anything* that is mundane is automated, because it's demonstrably cheaper to solve most IT problems with code instead of human robots.

I see this as the inevitable future of IT -- software engineers writing software, and system administrators that can't code out of work.