IT is Dead, Again
NetworkWorld is running a story today about Nicholas Carr's new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google which seems to argue IT is a dead department walking. I'm looking forward to reading it but in the mean time I have to settle for the bits I can glean from reviewers. From Network World:
"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."
At first glance this kind of statement may seem provocative especially since Carr seems to generate strong responses from IT pros. In reality, this is more like predicting it will be sunning, warm and dry in the Mojave Desert.
Of course we will need fewer IT professionals to code programs, run servers, and monitor networks. We do far more with fewer resources today than we did when I started in this business in 1984. Those of us still in the industry are doing different things than we did before (I can't remember the last time I wrote a Lisp program).
The move to utility computing will shift resource from managing IT infrastructure to using it. IT pros will be distinguished by the quality of their design work more than their ability to keep a server running. Microsoft Access enabled the average user to build their own databases; it did not turn them into data modelers or database architects.
Moving computing to the cloud will make IT more accessible but it doesn't guarantee the quality of what runs there. For that we'll still need what ever it is we will be calling IT pros after the demise of IT.
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