Is the IT Department Dead? 417
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."
Depends on the Market (Score:1, Interesting)
Reports of IT's death are greatly exagerated (Score:5, Interesting)
Back then it actually looked like it might. Now it doesn't. Who's going to replace that hardware router when it fails? Upgrade the equipment?
Perhaps the "IT department" will become for most companies what the post office is to the mail department; i.e. hired out to a specialty firm. But that hardly matters to the geeks in the IT department, they'll still get their paychecks. Their checks will just have a different company's name on them, that's all.
Good luck offshoring hardware replacement, or doing more than a script-based "help" desk.
Outsourcing by another name (Score:1, Interesting)
Just outsourcing with a different name, and instead to India, its to some random ASP.
This idea of utility computing fails to take in account of one thing: Security. Thanks to laws like SOX, HIPAA, and others, it can be considered breaching "due diligence" if a company outsources their IT to some "CPU warehouse", and the data gets breached.
Some things can be moved outside a company similar to power or utilities. IT and computing resources is not one of these items that can be passed to a utility company any more than a utility company providing office space or file cabinets.
Don't believe it. (Score:5, Interesting)
So IT in corporate America is going to be run completely by external companies, which I would assume are the companies that provide the hardware to us, according to this author.
I consider this flawed in two ways:
1. IT services are not dead: Even if no IT department existed, some company, person or entity will have to be responsible for upkeeping the hardware and software implemented, as well as ensuring that the network components and business computers are all functioning properly. You could change the name, slice and dice it a thousand ways, but in the end, the premise is the same: managaing the spread of information in an environment, which from what I understand is information technology.
2. IT departments are not dead: If businesses knew that outsourcing services to other companies were cheaper, this would have happened a long time ago. Not like the IT department people wouldn't have jobs; they would just be working for the companies supported by the corporations. So far as I know, it is by far less expensive to maintain an in-house staff that takes care of all of that then pay three-digit-per-hour services to do the same job, and not have adequate knowledge of the business network.
I am pretty new to the corporate aspect of the field, so I might be missing something that this author saw that prompted him to write his diatribe; if I did, please fill me in.
Electricity is a flawed analogy (Score:4, Interesting)
If this is his best analogy, I think IT is safe.
Real World Experience (Score:4, Interesting)
TI has the worst IT that I have ever seen, by a wide margin. I have never met so many so incompetent fools before. I have never seen such a shoddy network, such crappy software, and such a low quality in general. Run an IT project within TI and you have dozens of consultants running around, most producing work that is so shitty you have to completely rewrite it from scratch before you can use it.
This is a long story put very short, but it's taught me one thing: If you think that IT doesn't matter, that you don't need an IT department, that you can run IT as an afterthought, you will pay threefold for every buck you save in overhead, quality, availability, security and everything else that takes someone who knows what the fuck he's doing to get it done right.
balderdash. IT will scale back, but never vanish (Score:5, Interesting)
"In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form," Carr writes. "It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people."
Sheeeyeah- RIIIIGHT.
Wrong on SO many levels.
Little miss dolly dots who can barely operate MSWord and her email client is going to have the expertise to "Control the processing of information directly"? Fuck no. People like that couldn't spill pee out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.
I'm in an academic environment. I work with a lot of really smart and VERY accomplished people, but that doesn't mean they know jackshit about computers. They need Mike (our I.T. god) on an almost daily basis.
A friend of mine works for a Well Known Thinktank. Nobel prize winners, genius types. Most of them wouldn't be able to distinguish a USB cable from Firewire if their lives depended on it. you could give them tutorials all day long - and all you'd be doing is wasting their time, which is REALLY expensive.
And setting up these networks? And troubleshooting it all? When the print server's on windows, but the file server's on linux and I'm on a Mac and need something to print NOW? I am I going to "Control the processing of information directly"? I could, but in fact: Fuck No. I'm gonna call Mike, the IT deity for our department and he will fix it. IT will never go away, because (not to sound snobby, just acknowledging reality) some of us have better things to do with our time.
RS
Re:lack of disadvantage is advantage (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Respect. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, you touch on a really interesting subject. The US used to have a strong system of vocational education, which provided skilled labor for a number of industries' needs. Today, however, the vocational education system is increasingly abandoned, denigrated, and "replaced" by low-quality (low value) and inappropriate college education. As a result, vocational education is less focused and far more expensive than it needs to be.
Of course, universities love this trend, as it brings them money (at the expense of the traditional vocational schools and programs).
And no, I'm not going to support these opinions and assertions with any real data or references; this is Slashdot! (Actually, I'm not sure the best place to find statistics about this subject.)
Cost Centers (Score:4, Interesting)
There were two events that finally crystallized things for me:
1. I worked myself out of a job -- I partnered with a friend who needed someone to run the technology for a company he'd bought. I did such a good job of improving the infrastructure and training the junior sysadmin that we got to a point where we agreed that my six-figure salary did not make sense anymore. We parted ways, mostly amicably. Unfortunately, I had relocated to a part of the country that has a feeble economy, and the local IT jobs paid half what I was making, at best.
2. After spending time looking around locally and nationally for another lead sysadmin job, it finally dawned on me that I was screwed. My most enjoyable times as a sysadmin were when I was younger, single, and working for startups with more money than they knew what to do with. I had lots of responsibility and cash, and used both to make my job what I wanted it to be. Nowadays, I can't afford (literally!) that kind of job, and besides, I'm overqualified to be the young go-getter in a startup. The alternative is to go and work for an "established" IT department, which would give me the salary, benefits, and (most of) the stability I need now. Bleah.
Ultimately, I realized that the problem with IT is that it is a cost center. Those with a business background will be familiar with this concept, but it was an epiphany for me. Just like admin assistants, HR, janitorial staff, and facilities folks, IT are leeches on the company's resources. In a startup, the IT folks can play a role in creation of product, but in big, established companies, IT is there simply to maintain competitive parity with other companies. If executives could get rid of all those stupid servers, printers, desktops, whatever and simply focus on creating profits, they would. And so, when crunch time hits, IT gets hurt along with all the other cost centers.
With that realization in hand, I started re-shaping my career to get into product development. It's taken me a few years of scut work (having to start over again was something of a shock), but now I'm well on my way along a new career path in the world of HPC. It's a pretty narrow niche, but it's exciting and lucrative (for now). I create product now, and so I am directly responsible for increasing the corporate profits (hopefully!). I'm out of cost centers. I expect that I'll probably have to reinvent myself again at least once before I'm ready to hit the beach, but I've discovered that it's not so bad.
I guess the point of this rambling post is to encourage others in my previous situation to embrace change. Don't be afraid of the transition period. Accept that things will probably change anyhow, so it's best to be the one driving the change, rather than feeling victimized. Finally, make sure that you're still having fun. My father-in-law is in his mid-70s, and he still wakes up feeling excited about work every day. That's how I want to be.
The short answer is 'yes' with an 'if'... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think people are confusing two jobs here: help desk is not necessarily Information Technology. It is a service provided by IT today, however to lump it all in with IT is the same over-simplification as lumping "HTML jockeys" in with "programmers".
If Sally in Accounting can't drive her Word to get to the printer correctly, or Joe's hard disk needs to be replace, those are always going to be a help desk job, and that's always best served on site (assuming there's enough of a demand to make it cost-effective). However, outsourcing applications, data storage, and other services will see a corresponding decline in in-house IT.
Which sucks for the help desk monkeys, as there's no easy ladder from help desk into the "harder" IT tasks.
But the IT services will be outsourced:
Many of you are laughing, but all these services are happening today at varying scales. Eventually it will be cost-effective.
"IT" != "helpdesk" (Score:2, Interesting)
Problem is, that's not really relevant. In a major corporation, what percent of the IT budget do you really think is devoted to the helpdesk? Any HR department can find a million people who would be ecstatic to be simple windows support for $10/hr, just by placing a sign in front of the door. Now, what about those who are in it as a career? HR can't put a sign up saying "Looking for Senior UNIX Engineer with 10+ years experience with HPUX, Solaris, and Linux; additional qualifications are strong proficiency in C and Perl, some experience as an Oracle DBA, and must be able to pass a security clearance for work with our DoD customers."
Yeah, I don't see that as being successful as just a sign in front of the door. And guess what? When you think of getting rid of those folks making $60-$100/hr (or more, sometimes and in some places), the numbers start adding up really fast without even considering getting rid of the guy that installs printer drivers on your desktop.
Re:We have those now. (Score:3, Interesting)