{"id":1031,"date":"2008-01-09T23:07:22","date_gmt":"2008-01-10T06:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1031"},"modified":"2008-01-09T23:07:22","modified_gmt":"2008-01-10T06:07:22","slug":"its_alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1031","title":{"rendered":"IT’s alive!"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The IT department is dead, author argues,” announces<\/a> a NetworkWorld headline. And I, apparently, am the author in question.<\/p>\n

Now, far be it from me to criticize a sensationalistic title, but since it’s been Slashdotted<\/a> and generally kicked around the Net like a hacky sack, I figure I should provide a gloss on it. What I actually argue in The Big Switch, in the context of a description of the history of corporate IT and the recent rise of the Internet as a shared computing grid, is that the traditional identity of IT departments, as the builders and maintainers of private computing systems, is going to change – steadily and, I think, fundamentally – as companies draw on the grid to fulfill more and more of their computing requirements.<\/p>\n

If we look at the end game – a decade or two down the road for big companies; sooner for smaller ones – it’s hard to imagine that the “IT department” as we’ve come to know it will still exist. Many of the information-management and process-design skills currently housed in IT departments will continue to be of great value to companies, of course, but they will likely have been absorbed into business units and other departments instead of being isolated in a technically focused corporate function. Many of the purely technical jobs will have shifted from the users to the suppliers or been automated out of existence.<\/p>\n

As I discuss<\/a> with Ed Cone in the new edition of CIO Insight, this transition is going to bring big benefits to companies. What it offers, after all, is greater choice; it breaks a lot of the old constraints that have hobbled IT management in the past:<\/p>\n

\n

One of the great advantages of IT is its modularity. Companies should not think of this as some all-or-nothing choice. You can tailor your systems and your use of utility suppliers to do anything you need to do with IT. You shouldn’t think your choices are going to be constrained through this transformation; it’s going to give companies more choices in the end …<\/p>\n

One of the big challenges for IT departments is to figure out which elements they want to supply locally, which they want to get from the grid and how that mix will change over time as the utility offerings mature, proliferate and become cheaper. Determining where you put the “data socket,” and where you move it over time, is going to have a big effect on how efficiently and effectively companies are going to use IT into the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

IT departments still have a good long life ahead of them, and the quality of that life will be much improved if they embrace, rather than resist, the new choices presented by Web-based computing. To misquote Nietzsche: That which may kill us can also make us stronger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The IT department is dead, author argues,” announces a NetworkWorld headline. And I, apparently, am the author in question. Now, far be it from me to criticize a sensationalistic title, but since it’s been Slashdotted and generally kicked around the Net like a hacky sack, I figure I should provide a gloss on it. What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}