1. ConsultantsLet’s face it, all but the largest enterprises would prefer to not to have any IT professionals on staff, or at least as few as possible. It’s nothing personal against geeks, it’s just that IT pros are expensive and when IT departments get too big and centralized they tend to become experts at saying, “No.” They block more progress than they enable. As a result, we’re going to see most of traditional IT administration and support functions outsourced to third-party consultants. This includes a wide range from huge multi-national consultancies to the one person consultancy who serves as the rented IT department for local SMBs. I’m also lumping in companies like IBM, HP, Amazon AWS, and Rackspace, who will rent out both data center capacity and IT professionals to help deploy, manage, and troubleshoot solutions. Many of the IT administrators and support professionals who currently work directly for corporations will transition to working for big vendors or consultancies in the future as companies switch to purchasing IT services on an as-needed basis in order to lower costs, get a higher level of expertise, and get 24/7/365 coverage.
2. Project managers
Most of the IT workers that survive and remain as employees in traditional companies will be project managers. They will not be part of a centralized IT department, but will be spread out in the various business units and departments. They will be business analysts who will help the company leaders and managers make good technology decisions. They will gather business requirements and communicate with stakeholders about the technology solutions they need, and will also be proactive in looking for new technologies that can transform the business. These project managers will also serve as the company’s point of contact with technology vendors and consultants. If you look closely, you can already see a lot of current IT managers morphing in this direction.
3. Developers
By far, the area where the largest number of IT jobs is going to move is into developer, programmer, and coder jobs. While IT used to be about managing and deploying hardware and software, it’s going to increasingly be about web-based applications that will be expected to work smoothly, be self-evident, and require very little training or intervention from tech support. The other piece of the pie will be mobile applications — both native apps and mobile web apps. As I wrote in my article, We’re entering the decade of the developer, the current changes in IT are “shifting more of the power in the tech industry away from those who deploy and support apps to those who build them.” This trend is already underway and it’s only going to accelerate over the next decade.
Please read the whole piece. Much of what is detailed in this piece is already well underway. Equipment has become smarter. Managed switches increasingly mesh themselves by default. Routers and ATM’s the same. Equipment manufacturers now have service arms to assist IT shops in deployment and long term maintenance. eMail services of all types are moving to the cloud in a land rush. The ability to contract out or build your own clouds means that there will be fewer needs for managing individual servers. They will be treated like disposable peas in the pod.
So is the future bleak? No. But it does ratchet up the competency level of IT staff. Twiddling a wrench will still be requried, but the chance one will use the tool bag on a regular basis for core staff will dwindle. More likely that staff member will spend their time using MS Project and Excel in program roll outs.
Interesting times.
The invisible they are proctoring what we all see every day. That means if we are drawn to a bad idea or wrong information, we may never the good or correct thanks to personalization of search results. There’s also a deeper danger. Political agendas can easily be embedded into search algorithms for the purpose influencing opinions or even votes. Take away: never trust the impartiality of your search results. If you are an objective seeker of the truth, most relevant has become irrelevant. Going forward, he who controls search controls the agenda.
Facebook starts its own PAC. No one questions the right of a commercial enterprise to make the maximum legal donation. Soliciting and syndicating money from others is at best questionable. Add to that a new tracking ploy after all of the bad press prior user tracking ploys. Has Facebook crossed the line to evil? Does anyone who uses it care?
As Google+ goes public and signs users at a record rate, has the social media bubble burst?
The international Internet governance bickering is starting to look more like all out war. At point is the good old UN. And you thought it was an organization dedicated to promoting world peace?
The so called spectrum shortage is a hoax big enough to be worthy of Al Gore as its pitch man. While this is a shill piece for more government regulation and funding, it helps make my point: There is no shortage, just way too much spectrum in the wrong hands.
Is cable finally going to unbundle? While it may be the last best hope for growing video subs, I’m pretty sure it’s too little, too late.
First a quick summary. Microsoft is considering using signed UEFI. They’re argument is that signing provides better security from root kit malware. That is agreed. The problem is once in place it locks out any other OS from installation. The court would then be in the likes of Dell, HP and Lenovo to provide them. Will they? This could be a threat to Linux. A longer summary is here.
The real problem as the article mentions is that this is not Microsoft’s problem. Its the MFR’s. We are just helping them out by providing keys. Well yes, but couple that with their near monopoly on the desktop space and it becomes a deadly combination for other OS’s.
But there is a factor that few have considered. Salvage value. In the corporate space this is a salient factor in product selection. For the corporate space the average cost of a PC is about $400-500 per seat sans embedded labor costs. Corps refresh about every 4-5 years. CFO/CIO types consider that at the end of that life the PC has a 10% salvage value on sale to the secondary resale market. $50 bucks, so what? Numbers. A 100k+ desktop environment that most of the fortune 5000 have that translates to $5m.
So? Well the savvy CIO is going to take that $5m right off the top of the next refresh against the vendors margins which are tight enough already. That won’t happen you say! Wrong. That will and has occurred in the thin-client server market. Every project I have every been involved with the CFO types attribute $0 value to the terminals as they are useless in the marketplace without the server software and network.
Well that same consideration will be made by the CFO types when they realize they can’t offset the disposal costs with the salvage value. So they will discount the value of the deal right up front. Now on a $250m dollar refresh sale there may only be $5-10m gross out of the deal to begin with. So you could see why a company like Dell or HP might balk at seeing a exclusive signing deal for Windows 8 as a problem. Its in the fiscal numbers not the security.
Expect either the MFR’s will develop a common UEFI signing system or they will tell Microsoft no dice.
…Or why Apple’s Xmas may not be so stellar. Their Foxconn suppliers factory that builds the i’S had a major fire yesterday. GizChina has the story here.
The timing could not be worse. The plant was probably at full ramp up to get as much product into the store shelves before the Thanksgiving Black Friday appeared. Lack of unit sales will chew into Apple for the 4th quarter.
HT: GizChina
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