IT Futures
Many of the people reading this document may not remember the arrival of the PC in the early eighties and the disruption it caused. IT management fought long and hard to resist its arrival in many organisations, seeing the technology as difficult to manage and eroding the centralised IT power base. You have to remember that prior to the PC IT was the mainframe, and access to this precious resource was carefully controlled and measured. Departments would be billed according to the resources they used – it was all very rigid and unfriendly. It wasn’t very productive either – mistakes in input were difficult to detect and might not be spotted until the weekly or monthly reports were run.
Along came the PC. Users could manipulate spreadsheets with ease and correct mistakes immediately. Documents could be created at will and small databases be created which contained information that could not be accommodated on the mainframe. The rest is history.
The corporate IT function eventually legitimised the PC through client/server architectures, and the PC has become so ubiquitous that we rarely use this term to try and put the PC in context of the corporate IT function.
The arrival of the PC saw a massive boost in demand for technicians of all kinds. The fears of the old guard were unfounded – the PC did not destroy the corporate IT function it expanded its scope and influence even further.
Around five years ago there was a change in the use of information technology that went by almost unnoticed. In 2004 the consumer market for semiconductor technology became larger than that created by corporations and governments. While we may all think that corporate IT is the where all the action is, the reality is somewhat different. The major advances in the way we use information technology are happening in consumer markets. Cloud computing resources are used without hesitation by many individuals. FaceBook, Twitter, Google applications and any number of other on-demand applications have seen massive uptake – while the corporation jealously guards its in-house resources, fiercely arguing how dangerous cloud computing might be.
We also need only look at the widespread uptake of devices like the iPhone with voice, text, email, video and access to on-demand applications. Consumers are running ahead of the traditional corporations that serve their needs, providing much opportunity for new market entrants.
If we want to know what the future of IT looks like we need to eat a little humble pie and look at the consumer. On-demand IT resources, mobility, social networking, opportunistic collaboration, personalisation and most importantly much cheaper IT.
So how does this map into the managed IT environment of the corporation. The first thing we can say is that commodity applications such as CRM and ERP will sooner or later be hosted in the cloud. The companies offering these applications as SaaS (software as a service) will inevitably be able to do so at less cost than the do-it-yourself model that is used today.
Individuals and even groups of individuals within organisations will use on-demand resources, with or without central IT knowing about it. Collaboration systems are perhaps the best example of this. Departments within corporations are simply signing up to one hundred dollar a month collaboration systems and using them to coordinate their activities. Others informally use cloud storage such as Microsoft’s free SkyDrive offering to share documents, databases and other files. If a cloud resource becomes available that addresses a need not addressed by the organisation’s IT function then people will use it.
The IT department needs to understand one thing – the consumer model for the use of IT will become the dominant model within the enterprise. It will happen by osmosis and there will be no stopping it. So where does this leave the IT professional?
The starting point is to consider the employee as a consumer – a consumer of corporate IT resources. They will expect on-demand, personalised resources from within the enterprise, and if they don’t get them they will go elsewhere. So does this sound like less work or more work for IT? Well it sounds like more work to me – but since IT has only so many resources it will have to let go of something – those commodity applications. The enterprise will have to offer its own cloud to the user, and this will probably involve shifting some of its current workload into the cloud.
Let’s pretend for a moment that we are old-guard. We continue to offer a rigid set of applications with limited personalisation and little opportunity for sharing. Our users will simply go do their own thing within their departments and we will become less relevant to them. If we embrace the on-demand consumer culture we become fully engaged and the user will ask more of us.
This is a big change. IT likes to talk about centralised systems and grand architectures. Knowledge management is still perceived as some centralised function – but people are sharing knowledge informally in a way that suits them through networking and informal collaboration. It’s the same story with integration and large SOA projects. I’m not saying that these activities are unimportant, but I am saying that the focus is wrong. It should be outside-in and not inside-out as is usually the case. Some CIOs will get it others won’t.
I’ve already spoken with many IT professionals who see on-demand as a threat. It’s just a replay of what happened twenty five years ago. Resistance is futile, adapt or die.
