This is definitely happening to my department. Partly by a shift to outsourcing and largely due to the slow response times that we have come to be known for. (No fault of mine of course!). So I see it as a spreading out of the skills of IT into a variety of sources. My managers seem to believe that they will be able to sit back and just direct all this activity.

I'm not opposed to this direction, but there are wrong ways to go about it. Mainly, as mentioned above, is for what we now call "users" to start believing that because they can drag a dropdownlist onto web page designer, they are programmers. I see this happening now, and it is no different from 20 years ago when I saw so-called analysts drawing pictures and pontificating about how great their system was going to be, while they were actually wasting time on the front end.

I wish I could spend my life in the design phase too, but we all know the project gets finished at 2AM before the release date, then time that could have been better spent with prototypes and good data design is spent in maintenance. I have no solution for this, but if it means getting rid of some layers of managers, that is something that might work at my place.