Ask Slashdot: What Will IT Departments Look Like In 5 Years? 184
Lucas123 writes "As consumerization of IT and self-service trends becomes part and parcel of everyone's work in the enterprise, the corporate data center may be left behind and IT departments may be given over to business units as consultants and integrators. 'The business itself will be the IT department. [Technologists] will simply be the enabler,' said Brandon Porco, chief technologist & solutions architect at Northrop Grumman. Porco was part of a four-person panel of technologists who participated at a town hall-style meeting at the CITE Conference and Expo in San Francisco this week. The panel was united on the topic of the future of IT shops. Others said they are not sure how to address a growing generation gap between young and veteran workers, each of whom are comfortable with different technologies. Nathan McBride, vice president of IT & chief cloud architect at AMAG Pharmaceuticals, said he's often forced to deal with older IT workers coming on board who expect his company to support traditional email like Outlook when it uses Google Apps.' Sooner or later, IT departments are going to change. When do you think that will happen, and how will they be different?"
so what the article is saying is... (Score:3, Interesting)
that the terminology will change again? that happens every several years anyway, more or less.
What SHOULD happen with IT (Score:4, Interesting)
More Warehouses (Score:3, Interesting)
more centralised management of everything.
Why have three DBAs managing a single database when you can have 10 managing a 1,000?
Managed print services, Office online, more or less disposable laptops, cloud email, cloud active directory services etc.. etc...
There are too many people doing the jobs only a few are really needed for.
I think this centralisation will be bloody unfortunate for most of us.
There are suprising and disturbing parallels (Score:5, Interesting)
Standardization and merger/monopoly are happening in IT and in business.
How many products do you see that do everything. We have a forms package that does work flow and web design, a document program that does workflow and web design, we have a messaging layer that does work flow and web design. Each trying to capture the entire business. We see it with hamburger chains and doughnut sellers going after Startbuck's market. Now we see McDonalds going after Dairy Queens market and big box discount stores going after the Grocery chain market.
Everyone wants to be a one stop shop. Companies are getting there by buying up smaller companies and over and over.
The problem is the actual software developers will have fewer and fewer jobs for real development with few and fewer companies providing software.
Already our company is into buying packages and thinking they can save money by plugging everything together instead of targeted custom development.
The IT people of the future (if this trend continues) will be glorified plumbers. A few developers will make the design decision we will all have to live with.
Unless of course we start to recognize that this may not be the most cost effective way to do things, or that this dumbing down of jobs is bad overall for the society and we might see some anti-trust going on with breaking up of the swelling blobs of companies and packages and a new leaner meaner model emerging.
Who knows?
Re:The same (Score:5, Interesting)
No movement to outsource the management of the machines to outside cloud services? That may or may not happen where you are, but there's a lot of it going on, and it invalidates much of your list.
Your statement is a tad Naive. Do you truly think that the majority of services are going to the cloud? Only an idiot would trust the cloud with their corporate crown jewels. My opinion is that most companies will end up with a mix of services. But... Hey... What's new?
Where I work we are building our own internal cloud services, not outsourcing. Part of that may have to do with the fact that we are a large Biotech company and have various regulations that we have to comply with. Most cloud services, in my opinion, are being used by small to mid-size companies who do not have the economies of scale to run an IT department. Most large companies will use some cloud services but it's highly unlikely that they will trust cloud services with their crown jewels.
The point is that there will be a mixture of services that will need to be supported by IT....
Come on (Score:5, Interesting)
It will look exactly like they do today.
I walked by our IT department today and it looked exactly like they did 15 years ago at any company I worked at. A bunch of open PC's with parts and wires dangling out of them, a bunch of server racks in the never ending process of being upgraded, a bunch of obsolete parts strewn over shelves and desks, boxes of wires old keyboards and mice in the corner, old monitors and brick thick laptops that once cost a fortune now collecting dust because nobody knows how to get rid of them.
The actual server room is a way too cold room filled with racks of mismatched components from HP and Dell and homegrown solutions humming noisily away, the acrid smell of ozone and general neglect filling the air.
The eclectic collection of socially challenged uber-nerds that usually fill IT department staff, walking around with whatever phone was released just last week and squirreling all the best workstation tech for themselves..
You can walk into any "enterprise" IT department and see the exact same thing, over and over and over again.
All the "cloud" has done for the world is given consumers a place to store pictures of their cat's and access to music they would have otherwise (or already have) stolen. It has allowed people with a guilty conscience to stream movies and TV shows on demand for a low monthly fee.
For enterprise, Cloud is just another buzzword that IT managers love to throw around but the non-IT corporate execs will never let their company's intellectual property reside on some external 3rd party storage server.
All that will change is that in 5 years that room full of shitty server components will be called the "cloud" room, and no longer the "server" room us ol' timers call it. Every enterprise will try and build their own local "cloud" to try and remain hip to the lingo of the era.
Of course in 5 years nobody will use the terminology "Cloud" anymore. Either it will become Cloud 2.0 or Web Infinity or some kind of shit like that.
But the IT department will remain steadfast and unchanged.
Re:The same (Score:5, Interesting)
We're still running COBOL code from the 70's. Probably 600k lines of it all told, which is down from over a million lines around Y2K. It's all boring financial stuff, but utterly essential.
I'm a greyhair now, but I was in junior high school when this system first went online. The names at the top of the change log have been dead and buried for 20+ years. The names in the middle retired right after Y2k. The names at the bottom are all 55+ years old. COBOL coders are worth their weight in gold these days, but getting any to stick around for more than a year has been difficult. COBOL contractors can ALWAYS make substantially more money somewhere else.
The cost to analyze the codebase and build a replacement will cost a frikkin' huge fortune. Thus, I suspect the company will continue to run this same code long after my name has moved to the top of the change log and I've been archived on that big DASD in the sky.
IT won't be there in 5 years (Score:4, Interesting)
I spent 15 years being the IT staff for a small marketing company. Last November they decided to save a ton of money and outsource IT, which is working ok for them. They have some issues which will now never be resolved (like form letters with wrong contact names hard-coded into them), but on the whole they can work with the slowly self-crippling mess they have. It's worth the hassle for the savings, and the cheaper, outsourcing people will at least keep it running.
For them, it's all about money... and they aren't unique by any stretch. The days of the small IT shop, or the lone IT guy are fast coming to an end. Microsoft's push to kill the PC (aka Windows 8) isn't helping matters either.
I'll probably end up doing something in manufacturing or agriculture instead of IT now. It'll be fun and interesting, I'm sure.
Re:The same (Score:5, Interesting)
It's the beautiful cycle of IT.
Outsource to save money.
Insource to provide reliability/accountability.
Repeat.
Often the case, but I expect that in a few years we will in-sourcing to save money and provide reliability/accountability.
My company is in the process of outsourcing our data centers. We have already out-sourced our help desk support. Unfortunately, the help desk personnel are reviewed based on how many tickets they close rather than how well they actually resolve the tickets. They now do things like work the ticket for a few minutes then immediately send it to second or third level support. They are fairly incompetent when it comes to figuring things out so their escalation rate is much higher. In the case of my departmental sub-group, outsourcing our support will delay the initial call but we will eventually get it anyway. So the customer gets delayed and by the time it rolls around to my queue, they are already upset about the delay.
From a cost standpoint it doesn't make any sense either. As it is now, we don't bill out individual support to internal customers. We use logged hours as a proxy for actual costs (no chargebacks are in place) thus employee hours are free as far as cost of support is concerned (we are all salaried). When those initial bills come in for the support from the outsource firm, the company will be in for a huge surprise.
The company went through an outsourcing preparation exercise a while back. We were instructed to log everything, no matter how minor, so that proper metrics about help desk utilization could be calculated. The contract was based on the number of calls expected. If everything worked right, then the numbers would be spot on and the help desk requirements would match up. Then the next year rolls around. The contract is based on us providing a certain number of calls otherwise another paragraph kicked in that raised the per-incident cost. This was justified by the outsource firm because they said they would still need to pay technicians and it would end up costing them money if they over-committed resources. The only problem is that our call volume had been steadily decreasing over the years. This was because we continually improved our processes and eliminated many of the reasons for calls (e.g., automatic filesystems cleanups, self-reset of IDs via a password reset webpage, better monitoring). In the long run the outsource firm costs will double what we would have paid if we had kept it internal.
It is a joke and is what happens when the decision makers think in terms of short-term stock price.