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."
Is the IS Department Dead? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is the IS Department Dead? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is the IS Department Dead? (Score:5, Funny)
Peeking in on them from time to time simply won't work - long-term monitoring is usually required, as their movement can be so subtle. Stop-motion cameras work well for this. One of the best techniques is to detect their movement indirectly, by periodically checking the amount of junk food packaging in their trash cans throughout a workday.
Dan East
Re:Is the IS Department Dead? (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh they were moving. Killed each other by throwing HD-DVDs around.
lack of disadvantage is advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:lack of disadvantage is advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, substitute "self-propelled vehicle" for "IT department". By his argument, horse-and-buggy delivery is strategically viable for most companies.
Re:lack of disadvantage is advantage (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:lack of disadvantage is advantage (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:2)
Hmm. Sounds familiar [imdb.com]...
Re:lack of disadvantage is advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
I also should mention that I take issue with anyone that thinks "...the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud." Utilizing "the cloud" requires businesses to give up a lot of control over their data.
I can't imagine big business thinking that it'd be a good idea to put their information security in someone else's hands.
Re:lack of disadvantage is advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
But I think the best lesson out of this is to beware of anyone making grand proclamations, whether it's this guy or Dvorak or whatever. Let's remember, trolling is not restricted to Internet forums.
Re:Get rid of the 100 VP "frat house" that is mgt. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah. Even if one were to agree with this, it isn't for the reason you cite. The third world is making all of the products and providing the services now. Period. More importantly, they're making them CHEAPER (notice I didn't say better?). That's what all the rubes in management know that you don'
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Pasteurization is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anti-Pasteurization (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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1) To whom does pasteurization give a strategic advantage? (Answer: nobody, because everybody has it and it's the same everywhere)
2) Is pasteurization a "career"? (Answer: how many "pasteurizers" do you know?)
Nope! (Score:4, Funny)
HEEEELLLLLLL NO! (Score:4, Insightful)
seriously though... There is something to be said for physical presence. I can remote control computers, yes, but when the network connection isn't working, I have to physically get my hands on it. "just ship it out"... 9 times out of 10, it's a silly setting that an even sillier user changed, that they shouldn't have
Re: (Score:2)
Re:HEEEELLLLLLL NO! (Score:5, Insightful)
However, support functions and basic networking would be a lot harder to ship off to a third party with marginal personal interest in the multitude of operations they would be supporting. Disagree? Then I give you EDS and their infamous Navy IT services contract, and countless other examples.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like to see google services fix the computer that "Joe in accounting" just "updated"
seriously though... There is something to be said for physical presence.
Of course there is something to be said for physical presence. There is also something to be said for running your own on-location power plant (to use his example). The question is, is it worth it. For 99% of corporations it doesn't make sense to run their own power plant. Likewise, I think he's right about it not making sense for 99% of corporations to have their own IT department - the costs are high, centralized computing as a utility is getting cheap and effective. Only a matter of time.
Of course, w
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He also says that the PC will go away, although he does not say what will replace it.
Obviously, in his scenario, one needs only a browser with various plugins, the question is -- what kind of box will provide this and will it require significant support or no support? Personally, I doubt the "no support" idea.
I suppose that there is also a dumb terminal possibility, where the user terminal provides only something li
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Respect. (Score:5, Insightful)
There should be a registered apprenticeship, and it should take years to finish. The Certification schools should all be closed down and only true colleges and universities be registered to offer the courses.
If any boss thinks that you could be replaced by a student for $10.00/hr, then there is no respect.
Re:Respect. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure you have a career path that rises above $10 an hour even if you remain in help desk type positions. I doubt that endgame is here yet. When your boss gets hired for $10 dollars an hour then the end game is here.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Spurious logic (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
I know my users are all so skilled.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I agree... and further, while of course as a business owner you'd love for every person in your company to be able to do everything, the reality is that those people are going to be rare and expensive. If my company can hire accountants withou
Just like.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Though really, it's more like the public transport system. By rights, it should be cheaper and more efficient if everyone used the mass transit system, and we all hopped on busses and trains run by large commercial entities with a monopoly on all transport.
Reality, on the other hand doesn't quite work that way. There are a lot of places that will simply want their own stuff (hey, you control your building and your servers a lot more closely than putting them in a big datacenter, and hey.. What about when your building loses external network connections?).
The world is a diverse place with a lot of different cases. And any company that trusts their lifeblood to another (storing in one datacenter) trusts a little more than they really should.
The IT department, even in the world of datacenters, will still be there. Same as facilities departments, same as every other department, just the role may shift a little.
In a word, NO (Score:2)
As a layman... (Score:2)
It's only Resting ... (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Depending entirely on the nature of the business, a lot of companies in some industries have done exactly this.
It makes sense for an organisation with very little requirements in terms of technology - £5,000-10,000 per year will provide a fair bit of consultancy as long as your requirements aren't that complicated, but won't pay much in the way of fulltime IT support staff.
It can also
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that low-maintenance companies may not need an in-house staff (which is the reason-of-existence) for a lot of consultencies and hosted providers. However, would this be practical for a global or very large national company like Goldman Sachs or Ford?
It is these conglomerates and monopolies that justify the critical need for IT services and in house staff to provide them. Outsourcing major components of these departments would be detrimental not only to these companies, but the nation as well, unli
IT Depends... (Score:3, Insightful)
It depends on what the IT department is doing for the company. If the company is selling hot dogs or pursuing some equivalent activity, then IT is not going to generate value. IT then just supplies administrative tools to keep track of things, and having your own IT department may make as much sense as making your own paper.
If the company is in high tech, research & development, or in an environment where logistics are critical, then IT could make a real difference in the efficiency and profitability
I'm not dead yet! (Score:2)
As long as there is a PEBKAC there will be a need for IT and I don't believe the users will get any better anytime soon...
Not as long as (Score:2)
Yeah - electricians are dead too (Score:5, Insightful)
Idiotic (Score:2)
This guy is off his rocker (Score:3, Funny)
But there are some CEO's and CTO's that will read this, and cut more funding from IT departments, making life even worse for people going into and working in IT. More skilled people will leave, and then with less manpower, more crackers will be breaking into the companies that are stupid enough to listen to this moron, causing more tort lawsuits, more credit card and personal financial profiles will be stolen by russians, thereby causing the total collapse of western civilization as we know it.
Or maybe not.
Just the opposite is happening (Score:3, Insightful)
If it was, Marc Andreessen would have struck lucky with not only Netscape but Loudcloud. But he didn't, Loudcloud wasn't successful because corporations are not doing this. I can see how it makes sense to Andreessen and this fellow that this should happen. But corporations do not follow this logic, nor the logic of a Scott Adams or other techies who often puzzle at why corporations do things in a way that appears so peculiar to them. IMHO, it does make sense what corporations are doing, the problem is the Andreessens and Carrs and Adams of the world don't fully understand what the purpose of a corporation is.
Compartimentalization (Score:2)
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.
Business strategy alignment (Score:2)
GOOD business leadership determines the needs of the business and the market, defines and delivers a set of service requirements, and then works with IT to buy/build system(s) to deliver the required services. (On time and budget is a whole 'nother story) If IT is failing to deliver, then its poor management of the b
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:balderdash. IT will scale back, but never vanis (Score:2)
Most professors at the University, whom were honored scholars, prize winners, and very well respected and brilliant individuals had absolutely no ability to operator a computer out side of the bubble thy built. If you tried to deploy a new version of a program, they would immediately
Re:balderdash. IT will scale back, but never vanis (Score:2)
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.
BOB SLYDELL
So what you do is you take the specifications from the customers and
you bring them down to the software engineers?
TOM
That, that's right.
BOB PORTER
Well, then I gotta ask, then why can't the customers just take the
specifications directly to the software people, huh?
TOM
Well, uh, uh, uh, because, uh, engineers are not good at dealing with
customers.
BOB SLYDELL
You physically take the specs from the customer?
TOM
Well, no, my, my secretary does that, or, or the fax.
BOB SLYDELL
Ah.
BOB PORTER
Then you must p
I foresee some movement but.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, these providers will still need employees (the electric company has employees running their power plants), though there's an effeciency that should mean less are neccessairy.
Also, data isn't electricity. It doesn't make sense for all compa
In the long run, yes (Score:2)
While IT wont totally dry up, especially in huge shops, i do see a large part of the market for IT in the SMB world disappearing. The trend is already there.
We have pretty much 'technologied' ourselves out of a job.
Sounds like programming in the 1980's (Score:2)
Confirmation Bias (Score:2)
And I'm not even going to bother debating the absurdity of his electricity-computer power comparison...
If it's not dead yet, it will be soon... (Score:2)
My company insists on thinking of IT as a cost center rather than a strategic advantage. They would sacrifice millions of dollars in engineering productivity for the sake of saving a few thousand in the IT budget.
Time-Sharing, the Wave of the Future (Score:2)
We've heard this before. There's a presentation in AFIPS 1966 in which someone from Control Data was saying that each metropolitan area would have one giant, shared supercomputer.
"Grid computing" was a flop commercially, once the vendors started charging for it. Sun's service [sun.com] is still around, but they don't talk about it much any more. That was more like an effort to find something to do with their unsold server inventory. ResPower Render Farm [respower.com] has a real but very specialized business, quietly renderi
Sorry for this (Score:2)
The real name we should remember with awe and praise is Nikolai Tesla. He deserves the spot in history that Edison unjustly occupies and he deserves at least me trying to make the effort to point this out to you all, even if I get modded down for being off topic. He deserves better.
Don't do what you're bad at, outsource (Score:2)
Not the "cloud" AGAIN... (Score:2)
the IT department ... will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud
I'm sick of this love affair with "the cloud" (which I understand to mean " on the internet"). The cloud is neither reliable nor secure, and storing your sensitive data in it is suicidal. By the time you make the effort to secure your data (and secure access to it as well), you might as well have kept it on-site.
Yeah, Sure (Score:2)
Not dead yet, but Microsoft helping to kill it. (Score:2)
Sure, not every small business uses MS stuff, but the cost advantage of SBS2003 is pretty significant for many small compani
Client/Server WTF? (Score:2)
WTF? That makes no sense whatsoever. That's how you know the guy is completely clueless.
Anything can be outsourced (Score:2)
But the fact of the matter is businesses trust their data with contractors all the time. Using a utility computing vendor is no different than trusting the contractor you hire in house. It's all dependent on the contract language and what is signed.
Half a decade later, and still an idiot (Score:4, Informative)
Why are we bothering to listen to this idiot now?
Only some companies can reduce IT (Score:3, Insightful)
IT is a strategic investment (Score:4, Insightful)
Most keep their IT proprietary and in-house. Proprietary for the reasons I've given above. The keep it in-house because they realize that, by outsourcing it, at some point they are going to end up paying consultants for a system and those consultants are free to take the lessons learned and apply them to all their clients.
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.
riiight... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Hard to know where to begin (Score:3, Insightful)
While there is a point here that IT is changing in radical ways, didn't it always? IT has been a moving target for decades and will continue to be. Doesn't mean it's going away.
There's also the big problem he doesn't even seem to fathom; that any company worth its salt would rather have an IT department of employees. Why? Well, what happens if your primary production database goes down? Well, if you have an army of employees, you'll have an army of people mobilized in an instant to resolve the issue as quickly and reliably as possible because their jobs depend on it. If you have the same happen with "cloud IT" then you've got some call center rep in the Philippines who only knows you as customer X and really doesn't have a sense of ownership of the problem.
I must admit, I work in a Corporate IT environment after years of working as a consultant. I see the vast difference between the mindset of a consultant and an employee as a sense of ownership and a sense of being part of something bigger. Consultants (and cloud IT people) are tactical; they fill a need today. Employees are strategic; they try to do the best job they can to ensure they've still got a job tomorrow. Sure, it doesn't always work out and not everyone's of that mindset. However, I tend to find that those who do not have the strategic mindset tend not to last long in IT.
As much as I'd like to "ride the wave" of Cloud IT... knows I have the know-how to set up something truly great... I don't think it's going to be much more than an interesting aside to the IT industry as a whole. It'll provide some services to companies in the same way as consultants do; they'll fill a need in the interim until they can put in a permanent solution. The only place I see "Cloud IT" becoming a force to be reckoned with is the small company; less than 250 employees perhaps... where it's usually not cost-effective to maintain an IT department. A lot of the smaller end of this (100 employees) tend to hire consultants to deal with their IT needs... this won't be that different. However, there'll still be a need for the consultants in question to put in and maintain the local hardware.
But then there's the aspect of reliability; what if you can't get to your applications? Who do you call? The app vendor? Your ISP? The consultant who maintains your routers and may not be available until after 3pm? I know the small companies I still do consulting for like having local IT infrastructure (email, web and file servers) so that in the event something's really messed up and the apps don't work, worst case a phone call to me where I can talk a secretary through rebooting the file server usually does the trick. However, this isn't cloud IT... this is local IT supported by someone who's remote. Doable, but not something you need to rely on for your business!
Off-the-shelf not workable (Score:3, Insightful)
I worked at a truck-stop company (Flying J) working on their point-of-sale system. Which, trust me, covers a multitude more sins than you'd care to imagine. This exchange pretty much sums up why IT in a place like that won't go away:
CEO: "So why can't we just buy off-the-shelf software to do that?"
Me: "Because there is no off-the-shelf software that does that. And by the time it's common enough that you can buy it off the shelf, we've had it in production and solid for 5 years."
Example: RFID for transactions. Flying J was starting to do this back in 2000 for the big-rig side of the station. Grab nozzle, fuel, hang up nozzle, take receipt. That was 8 years ago, and you still can't find off-the-shelf systems that do this, let alone that integrate directly into the rest of the POS system.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, a lot of these imply people closer to the coal face. I can see the big centralized IT departments getting smaller and organizations moving to a decentralized IT staff. That could be interesting.
Re:Depends on the Market (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Depends on the Market (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with outsourcing things like the IT department is that as long as it's part of the business the IT people is "always" there - and they can do some other minor jobs too if they have time. And usually problems are fixed relatively fast. (but not always documented)
In an outsourced environment the user has to log a case and then wait for the outsourced IT department to pick it up. This IT department is probably reduced in personnel compared to the business IT department which means that there will always be a queue. And when the outsourced IT department guy finally shows up he can take a look and say - OH! - That's not an IT department problem - that's a XXX problem and we don't do these... Usually the outsourced IT departments are drained of competence too so you will get the guy with maybe some obscure MS certification but no experience in the business to try to solve your problem.
And it doesn't matter what your agreements with the outsourcing company says - the competence goes down and the overhead of the operation goes up when you outsource.
As a result - don't try to measure your IT department by the means of productivity on their part. If you see them sitting down relaxing - relax - there are no problems. If you can't find them - start to worry. If they are running like hell - it's panic time. See the IT department as the fire department for computer management - they may show up from time to time to do some proactive work. Proactive work usually doesn't look like much - but it may actually make a difference when something happens because at that time they probably know every corner of the building better than most people.
IT Dept == Guardian Angels. IT Vendor == Fire Dept (Score:5, Insightful)
While you _did_ mention proactive work, I don't think you give it enough credit.
Proactive IT work is the difference between having guardian angels watching over your company
In my experience, companies that use IT 'vendors,' the out-sourced IT departments, are the ones that have to call 'IT' when something's on fire. Companies with IT departments
IT Departments are likely to make everyone pissed because your email will be down for a few *_MINUTES_* (!ZOMG!! not My EMAIL!~!%!)
IT Vendors are likely to "save the day" after everyone's email has been down for a day and a half ("Thank you, fireman!")
Re:Depends on the Market (Score:5, Insightful)
R + I > R + P + O + E
R = Required: Cost of work required to do the job in the best way with maximum efficiency
I = Internal: Extra cost due to effort required by Internal staff to accomplish task due to incompetence or inexpertise
P = Profit: External party's (outsourcee) required profit to do the work. ie. The contractor's cut.
O = Overhead: Extra management cost of outsourcing for both the outsourcer and the outsourcee.
E = External: Extra cost due to effort required by External (outsourced) staff to accomplish task due to incompetence or inexpertise
In other words you're gambling that the company you're outsourcing your work to is so much more competent than your own people that even after they've made a handsome profit and after you've paid the overhead to manage the relationship you'll still be ahead paying for the outsourcee's solution.
Now sometimes outsourcing is a good gamble. For example economies of scale in manufacturing mean you'd never ever want to produce 100 office staplers yourself. Forget for a second that your core business isn't making staplers, think of the cost of tooling when producing 100 vs 10 million. Similarly for software no company is going to write their own word processor when there are feature rich off the shelf packages out there.
However for most custom work where a business wants to and is large enough to do things their own way, even if it's not your core business, unless you're going to leverage external expertise (or a code base) that you don't have in house or won't need for long (and therefore can't afford to hire and manage) P + O + E will be much greater than I. Unless of course your in house staff is nonexistent or so brain dead it needs to be replaced.
I understand that I've oversimplified above, but what I don't understand is why people high up in the decision making structure in big business don't understand it even this well. It shouldn't require huge textbooks and research to understand this.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Great, can you swing by tommorrow around 9 AM? I'm having some trouble with my sound card.
Re:Depends on the Market (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Depends on the Market (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless, this guy is only partially correct.
Correct: Computing data is similar to electric power generation in that it will be increasingly centralized.
Incorrect: The jobs are just gonna disappear.
In his example, he forgot that there's not just one guy running the power plant up the street. He also forgot the need for power strips, backup generators, batteries for portable goods, stores to sell the batteries, power strips, etc, and of course, your friendly neighborhood electrician.
In other words, yes, there's a shitload of centralization, but it still takes a lot of jobs to get electricity into the consumer's hands. Computing will be no different.
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-Lars
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Re:Depends on the Market (Score:4, Insightful)
Outsourcing != Off-Shoring
Sure, you have to be careful with sending your data to other countries, especially where your home nation doesn't have legal extradition. But don't paint the whole idea of outsourcing with that brush...
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Re:Depends on the Market (Score:4, Informative)
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No need for an IT department to do that. I used to work for a government organization providing IT services to other GOs who outsourced their office IT. We'd take care of our and our customers servers while IBM GS took care of our workstations, printers and so on. The fact that this is happening in a GO (who'd usually be late-adopters of novel business tactics and most anyt
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The IT Career path is a mis-nomer, more like a dead end.
Do you like pulling cable? Reinstalling Windows? Lugging hardware around? Crawling under desks?
Excellent point. The IT Career path teaches a fairly limited set of computational expertise. Most people in IT would laugh at anybody who claimed to be a career Waiter. Each position requires a basic set of skills (more so for IT), but limited growth potential. A waiter can become a staff manager or even endevour to start his own restaurant, but that would be the exception. Most likely, he would get bored and go to school to do something different. An occasional few who truly enjoy waitering will do
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Most people in IT would laugh at anybody who claimed to be a career Waiter. Each position requires a basic set of skills (more so for IT), but limited growth potential. A waiter can become a staff manager or even endevour to start his own restaurant, but that would be the exception. Most likely, he would get bored and go to school to do something different. An occasional few who truly enjoy waitering will do the job until retirement.
Except for those that get into the New York Banquet waiters union. Where Doctors and lawyers work alongside immigrants without any college training.
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He's got a Harvard degree. He says provocative things. He tells managers, CIOs and CEOs that they can ditch their IT departments and save $$$. Of course he's going to get traction.