

The IT department is dead - iamelgringo
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/010708-carr-it-dead.html

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enigman
Uh-huh. This guy Carr reminds me of the famous New Yorker cartoon showing two
scientists standing at a blackboard. On the left and right are a bunch of
equations, and in the middle, connecting the left-side with the right-side is
a cloud labeled "then a miracle occurs"...

See it here: <http://www.cartoonbank.com/product_details.asp?sid=40967>

Or maybe he was the screenwriter of the movie "Independence Day" who thought
that genius hacker Jeff Goldblum could easily connect his earthling laptop to
the alien mother-computer and inject a virus that would destroy all their
critical systems. Great cinema, lousy computer theory.

I work for a high-priced technical consulting company and regularly work
closely with a number corporate 1000 companies. Guess what? Their problems are
complex, their systems and applications are complex and wildly divergent (even
when comparing companies within the _same_ industry), and their management and
IT people exhibit vastly different levels of skill. It is far from being a
cookie-cutter world out there, and Carr is a fool for implying otherwise.

Carr is making a living by being controversial and inflammatory. He should
spend more time on the ground actually working closely with some IT
organizations and get to know their problems... then let's see if he believes
this nonsense then (assuming he's even capable of understanding the details of
what his IT friends actually _do_ from day to day).

Shame on any execs who actually swallow this bilge...

------
staunch
Most of what internal IT departments do is act as support. They mediate the
non-technical workers relationship with technology. That's not going away just
because the servers happen to be a few extra miles away.

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umjames
How will data that should be private and well-protected (like health and
financial information) work in this "cloud"?

Besides, most IT departments relish complicated proprietary "enterprise"
technology for job-security reasons. They're not going to tell the CEO that
they're no longer relevant, not when IT is already viewed as a cost center.

~~~
edw519
"They're not going to tell the CEO that they're no longer relevant"

No, the shareholders will when the "cost center" starts eating into their
dividends.

------
henning
"Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the
processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical
people."

lulz! Typical employees can't even keep their Windows systems free of spyware.
Suddenly they're interested in "controlling the processing of information
directly"?

And how is this cloud utility computing going to work? Web applications? A
monster JavaScript hack is going to replace Excel? Not anytime soon,
especially for hardcore users.

As long as someone accidentally backing a truck into a power cable in San
Francisco can immediately take down a third of these bratty little Web 2.0
outfits, little of what Carr says is going to transpire anytime soon. (It
doesn't matter, even if your quarterly report is due in 8 hours - this is WEB
2.0!!!)

Oh, and good luck getting companies off Exchange Server.

~~~
jimbokun
"Typical employees can't even keep their Windows systems free of spyware."

He also predicts the demise of the PC.

"As long as someone accidentally backing a truck into a power cable in San
Francisco can immediately take down a third of these bratty little Web 2.0
outfits, little of what Carr says is going to transpire anytime soon."

You can make the same argument for on-site power generation. That didn't keep
companies from using the power grid.

"Oh, and good luck getting companies off Exchange Server."

This is actually a good point, for reasons of compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley,
etc. Corporations likely want tight control of email for legal reasons, at
least for now. If that gets solved by an off-site email provider to the
satisfaction of corporate attorneys, on-site Exchange installations won't last
long, either.

~~~
henning
Demise of the PC? To be replaced by what? Thin clients?

Will it maintain backward compatibility with all the unmaintained proprietary
software people use to run businesses? Probably not (Windows is very unhip and
everyone uses Linux).

Weren't thin clients supposed to take over long ago?

I think everything he says will _eventually_ happen, just not soon.

"You can make the same argument for on-site power generation. That didn't keep
companies from using the power grid."

A major selling point of these stupid data centers is supposed to be their
high uptime and resilience against power problems. What went down is a data
center, and that killed dozens of hip Web 2.0 services. If all your computing
stuff is in the cloud and a major part of the cloud goes down, you have no
computing and you have absolutely no control over the situation, because after
all, the data center never goes down. Oh well, you're doing what the pundits
tell you to!

I'm fucking sick of how people on this site don't care that web applications
often have shitty uptime.

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trekker7
Yahoo and Microsoft will trust their data with Google?

Besides this problem, I think he is right.

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Tichy
Hm, I don't know?? Sure, standard things like email can be outsourced, but
isn't IT in theory a blueprint for the business processes in the company?
Would that mean that all companies would be the same? I don't think that will
happen.

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mynameishere
Oh, right. The cloud. Whatever.

------
edw519
I agree.

This is the same argument for microcomputers 25 years ago. IT departments
fought against them because they feared losing control. They were foisted upon
the organization by users that refused to wait months (and years) for apps, so
they made their own.

The same thing is happening again, only this time it will be much, much
faster. You don't need much budget approval to get it done in the "cloud".

