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.
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.
Lets do the count of those devices that the original Star Trek suggest would exist some time in the future –
Cell Flip Phone == Trek Communicator
Voice Recognition == Desk Computer
PCMCIA/USB Memory == Recording Chips
Naval Laser == Battle Phaser
Medical Tricorder == Medical Equipment
Well you can one more to the list. We now have the Universal Translator by Vocre. Its built for the iPhone at the current time. You can bet they will port it to the Android as well. For the foreign borne traveler this will be a must have load on your smart phone.
And of the course the episode where the translators (the silver thing on their belts) appeared
Only things left are the transporter and warp drive. Both of which are near physical impossibilities with our current understanding of physics.
I predict an upsurge in garages if this request meets Supreme Court muster. –
The Obama administration is urging the Supreme Court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.
The Justice Department, saying “a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements (.pdf) from one place to another,” is demanding the justices undo a lower court decision that reversed the conviction and life sentence of a cocaine dealer whose vehicle was tracked via GPS for a month without a court warrant.
The petition, if accepted by the justices, arguably would make it the biggest Fourth Amendment case in a decade — one weighing the collision of privacy, technology and the Constitution.
In 2001, the justices said thermal-imaging devices used to detect marijuana-growing operations inside a house amounted to a search requiring a court warrant. The justices are likely to accept the government’s petition to clear conflicting lower-court rulings on when warrants are required for GPS tracking.
I find it fundamentally unsettling that the FBI or other federal agency could cross on to your property, attach a device to your car and be legal. It all hinges around the idea of what is a search. Your car in in the driveway, hence it is in public view. I think the trip up tho is the clause “…and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” The place to be search. Well if the warrant alludes to transportation in the driveway the matter has been met. But what happens as soon as the car goes to the grocery store? The place has changed and generally the search or seizure is invalidated. On the other hand police have done stakeouts since the days of Elliot Ness and that is legal.
A case to watch.
Now what do you think will happen? The DARPA folks getting $50m in funding for a language translation device vs a iPhone Appstore device for $20? I would hazard it would not be the cheaper of the two –
On one side of the scale: an app developer that wants to translate Pashto and Dari on your iPhone. On the other: around $50 million in federal money, this year alone, for research into a Cadillac version of the same translation tools. Which sounds like the better deal?
As Danger Room first reported in February, the Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers are asking Congress to fund three major pushes for developing a universal translation device. Darpa’s projects admittedly sound cool. BOLT, the Boundless Operational Language Translation, will be so sophisticated it can understand foreign slang. Robust Automatic Translation of Speech — yes, RATS — will know the difference between speech that needs translating and background noise to discard. MADCAT is a mobile document reader that translates text.
And while all that goes through the federal funding, acquisition and development process, along comes the SpeechTrans app for the iPhone and iPad. Load the app, record a spoken phrase you want translated, choose your foreign language, and the app will speak it back to you, all while displaying both versions of your text on the screen. National Defense reports the New Jersey-based company is working to add Afghan languages “that troops need in current combat zones.” The 1.2 version of the “universal” SpeechTrans already offers Arabic.
Source
Sadly government funding is more than just the money. There is politics involved. And you can rest assured that any of the companies listed most likely have links to the CongressCritters in the districts where they operate.
But I have a more pressing question. Who owns the consession on the SPIDD (Smart Phone Interactive Destructive Device)? It would seem to me that there would be a need for a blaster that would wipe the devices clean at a mere gesture.
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