June 12, 2013 at 10:27 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Five Year Plan
June 13, 2013 at 1:35 am
I see the role of internal infrastructure guys changing radically. Some aspect of their work vanishing completely but other aspects, particularly surrounding security and monitoring getting much more emphasis.
Technological change, particularly in storage is going to affect anyone whose area of responsibility touches that area of change.
If developers can spin up what instances they need in the cloud then although these instances are cheap PAYG computing if you don't keep track of it you end up with death by a thousand cuts. Look after the pennys and the pounds will look after themselves.
I can remember when the Amstrad PC1640 came out complete with Informix Smartware (very early office suite, Microsoft hadn't released Excel at this point). One of the marketing guys turned around and said "you'll all be made redundant, we don't need you anymore". That was 30 years agon 'nuff said.
Despite the rate of change I'm surprised that more progress hasn't been made. I'd hoped for some sort of public global repository of components that auto-updated. If someone wanted to capture an email address then they should simply tell their app to use the one true version. If the standard for an email address changes then everyone's app changes automatically with no programmer involvement. Data quality issues caused by dodgy development becomes a thing of the past.
I can also remember when .NET came out having a conversation where one of our senior developers gleefully stated that the disciplines that .NET expected was going to kill off all the cowboy coders.
Anyone starting today would be shocked by what their predecessors had to to to fight with the early versions of MFC. The sheer amount of code that was necessary to produce a simple Windows form was shocking. Today its drag and drop, set a few properties and fill in the bit that actually delivers value to the business. Back then it was work out how to get windows to resize and redraw correctly, controls to respond to events.
In short, IT will still exist in 5 years time, 25% will have gone, 50% will stay the same, 25% will be brand new and unimagined today.
June 13, 2013 at 3:04 am
I have just returned to working for my company's onsite IT department as a developer, after having been lent out to an engineering project for 9 months, so the last paragraph certainly rang true with me.
This is the second time I've temporarily traded SQL/ASP.NET for engineering work, and I can definitely see it happening again in the future. Especially as the management on the project I have just finished working for has already informed me I can expect to be working on it again in a few months time...
June 13, 2013 at 5:48 am
It seems that every five or ten years some wag starts prognosticating that IT departments will be dead in another five or ten years. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
I would only add that way back in the dark ages you had to have a centralized IT if for no other reasons than the "geeks/nerds" were pretty much the only ones who understood the stuff. Now it's all but impossible for any one individual to truly know and understand the myriad technology out there and new stuff is cropping up all the time. Coupled with the fact that business people and the public at large have become more and more tech-savvy, IT is becoming more facilitative in the sense of "how do we get this widget to work in our environment?" Yet, when the shiny new gizmos break or don't work as expected: "Who ya' gonna call?"
____________
Just my $0.02 from over here in the cheap seats of the peanut gallery - please adjust for inflation and/or your local currency.
June 13, 2013 at 6:34 am
Google "Shadow IT".
Very interesting.
June 13, 2013 at 7:13 am
Cloud is a security disaster.
Look at the NSA mess. Any large company now has to worry about where their data is stored, which country will pass what secret espionage orders (and that's what the NSA is doing, let's call a spade a freaking shovel here).
Problem is, the shift to cloud is a major undertaking. Encryption is only as good as the algorithm and you're expecting your data to remain secure over hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles of geography?
Encryption will only be viable IF no formula is ever discovered to factor large prime numbers easily. The instant it is--poof. ALL encryption goes bye-bye.
That day will come. The cloud won't be able to handle it. At least a local server can be physically protected. A data center?
Bye-bye cloud. Pity you took civilization with you...
June 13, 2013 at 7:32 am
I suspect these types of articles are written by people who have little or no experience with IT in very large organizations, especially with respect to ERP systems. Absent central coordination, companies will end up with higher costs, and systems that don't play well together.
For my employer, IT is responsible for enforcing the budget constraints on computing imposed by senior maangement. If each unit is allowed to do their own IT, you rapidly lose the ability to understand how much IT costs, and how effective it is.
I also suspect that decentralizing IT would result in a major increase in the incidence of cyber-security events as some groups decide not to comply with security policies.
June 13, 2013 at 7:33 am
Oh my, what comes around goes around again and again. How many of you remember being told to drop your Subject Matter Expert title and be ready to know a little about everything! And now you are going to be dropped into other departments as a Subject Matter Expert! And what about IT developing the applications and turning them over to the business to manage? Now the business will turn applications over to IT? I think in the end we will find you will need IT more not less. It is the way of technology. Stay strong my friends!
June 13, 2013 at 7:42 am
I can see their point but don't believe 100% of it.
Roll back to, say, 1985 when huge energy consuming Mainframes ruled IT... PCs that were connected and servers were not really around. In order to have any kind of application, (Payroll, AR, AP, etc) you had to spend quite a bit of $$ and have a decent amount of knowledge to implement this. Fast foward to today with the world of PCs and servers... in a matter of a couple of hours you can have a Windows server and an application installed and be connected to it via a URL. AND one person can basically do this. Way back when you'd have to spend quite a bit of money to get a Mainframe up and running in a controlled environment and several folks would be involved to do this same thing and it would take more than a couple of hours.
June 13, 2013 at 7:45 am
We need to remember that these people get paid to make predictions, not to be right. Maybe one day the C-Suites of the world will recognize that these predictions are being made by idiots.
Other predictions made in my life that were just as bad, if not worse:
We will run out of oil by 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Code generation tools will replace programmers by 1990 2000 2010 2020
Amnesty will end illegal immigration
Teaching (abstinence/sex ed) will put an end to teenage pregnancy
Hope and change
I will be rich by age 25
OK, the last one is true, I did meet and marry my better half, and she makes me feel rich!
Dave
June 13, 2013 at 8:30 am
David.Poole (6/13/2013)
In short, IT will still exist in 5 years time, 25% will have gone, 50% will stay the same, 25% will be brand new and unimagined today.
I know that I am being pedantic but surely one 25% is replacing the other so that totals to 75%.
I get your point though and totally agree.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
June 13, 2013 at 8:34 am
New technology does not mean the old technology is going away. Technology has a purpose, and only goes away when its utility goes away.
I read somewhere that there are more horses in the US now than there were a hundred years ago, so the automobile never quite eliminated horses.
Even punched cards are still in use in some applications, and many file formats standards are still in use that were based on punched cards, with the 80 column format still alive in terminals and the default column width for the Windows command shell.
Nine track reel to reel tapes did finally go away, but production did not end until 2001 and the last drive was shipped in 2003. However, newer forms of tapes and drives are still widely used for backups.
I have a friend with a small non-technology business, and he has two employees out of twenty who are dedicated to IT. He didn’t plan to have an IT department that was 10% of his workforce, but it happened and he feels he needs them.
So the death of IT departments may not be as imminent at the predictions. They will disappear only when they no longer have any value.
June 13, 2013 at 8:52 am
I would have to agree with many of the comments here, particularly Michael Valentine Jones', as decades on and I still get involved in creating enterprise systems from department cobbled ones e.g. their use of Excel, Access or even far more professional attempts.
In the end, if a system is mission critical to a company or nearly that important then the nonfunctional aspects that the IT department brings (redundancy, disaster recovery, etc.) are essential and something that departments rarely implement to that satisfaction of the board.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
June 13, 2013 at 9:37 am
The IT helpdesk will go away about the time that the sun goes nova.
June 13, 2013 at 9:40 am
I think the author is a better salesperson and self-promoter than a prognosticator. For one, IT departments are organizational constructs no matter the current technology they employ and process is central to an efficient IT operation, especially the bigger ones. This is simple puffery.
Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 33 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply