
IT departments won't exist in five years - ilamont
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239815/IT_departments_won_t_exist_in_five_years
======
protomyth
Ah yes, the annual IT won't exist article from Computerworld.

Two big problems. The first is legal. Records and the handling of records are
an amazingly complicated problem. Not so much from the storage[1], but access
and preservation in the face of lawsuits.

The other is political. It is amazing all of the political processes that
apply to machines. From access to locking down certain parts (e.g. cameras in
research organizations). Maybe external companies will take over the entire
function, but I doubt it lasts past the first three day failure to access
documents in the cloud.

1) although from a technical point of view, enterprise document stores are
super unfriendly. think giving code control with a crappier interface to Admin
Assistants.

~~~
scj
I'd suggest a third problem, networking effects.

Consider the example of a team using LucidChart rather than Visio. That's fine
for internal use, but if you work for a firm that contracts with others, then
you need to be able to read the Visio files they send you (and vice-versa).

~~~
CodeCube
If you use lucidcharts, then, as a customer you have the right to say, "send
me lucidcharts" (I don't know if that's necessarily how that particular
service works, I've never used it). Now, if lucidcharts is that good for you
and your contractor won't use it, then that's an opportunity for someone else
to swoop in and offer the service you'd like to pay for.

~~~
tixocloud
This assumes that there isn't already a pre-existing relationship with the
current contractor and that the quality of work provided by all contractors
are the same. It's also saying you can get up to speed with the new
contractor/service right away. Not saying it's not possible but there are some
switching costs involved.

~~~
hnal943
It also assumes the contractors refuse to use lucidcharts, which when faced
with the possibility of losing business, seems unlikely to me.

~~~
gte910h
I know I've refused to use random tools customers have pulled out of the air
before. There are definitely quality control issues at times

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Piskvorrr
Meh. I have seen _this exact article_ approximately ten times between 2000 and
now; the only thing changing are the buzzwords. "IT departments won't exist in
five years [because OMG $NEWEST_FLASHY_GADGET]". What about some flying cars?
We've been getting those "five years from now" since about 1930...

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Thin clients mean less IT!

Thick clients mean less IT!

VDI means less IT!

Citrix means less IT!

Terminals services means less IT!

Drupal/Wordpress means no more web devs!

Ipads mean less IT!

Mobile means less IT!

Cloud means less IT!

If anything, these things tend to create more IT jobs. Now we need another
helpdesk guy to handle everyone's mobile devices, a MDM server, someone or run
that, a better local wifi network, a more secure wifi network, etc etc.

~~~
nasalgoat
That said, many of those things did actually result in "less IT" in the sense
that fewer people can now run larger installs.

For instance, I have a team of four people to run 400+ physical machines,
whereas in 2000, I needed a team of ten or so to do a similar job.

~~~
Piskvorrr
More precisely, "less IT for _that one task_ , while the number of IT tasks
grows ever larger".

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ebbv
Stupid clickbait.

Anyone who thinks that every young person is so technically apt that they
won't need an IT department to handle the network, servers, backups, etc.
doesn't know very many young people.

Sure, young people are familiar with Gmail, Word, etc. at a higher rate than
old people. But a lot of young people still don't know how to configure a
router's firewall rules.

Small companies don't necessarily need an IT department, but big companies
always will because their IT needs are more complicated. Duh.

~~~
zeidrich
The point is more, what network? servers? backups? if all you need for your
business is handled over encrypted connections to hosted services, another
company is your server, and they do your backups. Do you even need a network
in a traditional sense, or do you just have 4G on your devices through a
company plan?

IT will never go away, but for many common scenarios it becomes a simpler
problem that needs fewer dedicated resources. A lot of young people don't know
how to control a modem with AT commands. A lot of young people don't
understand how to resolve IRQ conflicts.

Why do you need to configure a router's firewall rules? You only really need a
configurable firewall if you expect to receive incoming connections. The
servers that are going to exist on your own premises instead of as cloud/saas
solutions or just colocated are already decreasing. As they decrease, the need
to support them shifts to the businesses that operate those services.

Eventually in those circumstances, it's only the planning, implementation and
migration that requires technical know-how. Well, and those creating the
services.

~~~
nasalgoat
Anything beyond basic, generic "IT" will need people to manage it.

Is everyone on 4G wireless? How do you control security and access to company
intellectual property? You just trust third party solutions that could go down
at any time?

There's a million reasons you'll need IT.

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netcan
In the future, computers will be easier to run (like ipads) and software like
email will be solved to the point that you don't need an IT department running
around keeping the computers working.

That would be true if our needs were static. Realistically, as soon as email
gets solved properly and we don't need an IT department to run it we will need
them to run something else. Some saleforce script that downloads all the leads
marked "up" and changes them to "charm" unless the salesperson's name begins
with a q.

IMO, the general space occupied by what we now call IT will grow. Using the
right collaboration software and building the right culture around it can have
a huge impact on a company. The person in charge of that stuff could be a
pretty important person for a lot of companies in the future.

~~~
twistedpair
The classic homeostatic fallacy. People routinely forget that history is not
linear. When new capabilities comes along, they just assume it will make the
current world continues on its path. They fail to consider the new niches and
industries that a change will create/destroy and the increasing complexity it
will result in.

For example: micro computers and office software suites were going to make us
more productive and thus result in the "4 day work week" since we'd have so
much free time. The reality is people were laid off (don't need as many) and
those that remained were doing multiple times the work.

As the "cloud" gains more traction businesses will find it easier to consume
IT, but it will result in ever greater consumption of IT services and more
elaborate use of them in business. Figure out exactly how and you'll be a
millionaire.

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awjr
I'm not even going to attempt to read this article. What I will say is I can
remember in the late 80's early 90's management declaring that programming
would be dead within 10 years and you would only have to describe what you
wanted done to a computer.

~~~
lotsofcows
Always makes me laugh. Most people can't describe what they want done to a
person, let alone a computer.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Oh, _come on_ : you mean that I can't just tell the computer "Do What I Mean"
and have it accomplished?

------
pizu
IT departments will always exist in the Enterprise.

I work for a major ISP in the UK and they will never move to cloud for their
core systems (Network, CMR, Billing, Provisioning). If you are trying to sell
any software to them, they will ask you if you can provide a build that they
can then deploy on their servers. Forget cloud computing. That may work for
some teams and some functions within the business (e.g. marketing, online dev,
UX) but the core functions, where you'll find customers' data, will never be
moved to the cloud.

~~~
corresation
Never is a word that should never be used (har har): it is a futile attempt to
shackle the future with the biases of the present, and unless you have a time
machine it is a statement that can't be proven.

~~~
twic
Entropy in a closed system will never decrease. Enjoy your shackles.

------
petepete
"IT departments won't look quite the same in five years as they do now".

------
jamessun
One of the better lessons I learned in Social Studies class in high school was
that history swings back-and-forth like a pendulum. We go from one extreme to
another.

We are in the era of BYOD and SaaS. We started with dumb terminals connected
to mainframes, moved to standalone PCs, transitioned to client/server, got
connected to the internet/web with browsers and now are connected globally to
cloud-based servers and services.

There is a role for IT departments. What is certain is that the role of IT
will shift to adapt to the times.

------
jusben1369
I saw this from Sam Altman a few months back:
[http://blog.samaltman.com/software-to-avoid-the-software-
peo...](http://blog.samaltman.com/software-to-avoid-the-software-people)

To paraphrase "A few years ago, many of the Y Combinator B2B startups wrote
tools for the developers in other companies" and how that has changed
resulting in "so now the startups are trying to avoid the developers at the
other company (so they don't get blocked) and sell to the person who is
waiting in the internal development queue."

I was selling enterprise SaaS in 2000 (yep, when we were called "ASP's") and
back then we were writing and reading about how one of our greatest strengths
was allowing business owners to avoid their own internal IT departments. One
theory on the reason why Salesforce.com was/is the most successful SaaS
company is because it targeted the VP of Sales (initially) This was the most
"rebellious" leadership profile who often didn't connect well with a CIO and
basically used their own budget to end around IT and get the tool into the
hands of their end users.

I think - based on this coming up to being a documented 15 year + theory - it
probably needs some fresher thought around how the role of the IT department
will morph vs not exist.

~~~
k3n
That sales strategy is exactly what the sales team at my day job does; our
software requires heavy buy-in from IT departments, and the payoff isn't in
the IT realm but more for the foot soldiers on the ground (and of course, the
bottom-line).

At one point, it became obvious that it was much easier to wine & dine the
non-technical executives than it was to win over the CTO. Also, it's a double-
win since even if you had managed to win over the CTO, they'd (the CTO + our
sales team) would still have to win over the other executives. However, if you
flip that around, the CTO is really the only one you have to convince, and if
you've made a good enough case upfront then the CTO will have a really hard
time stopping it.

------
furyg3
Yes...certainly the commoditization of IT equipment and its use in nearly
every job function will lead to decreased dependance on IT departments (?).

I've been more or less involved in medium-sized IT shops my whole carrer, and
while it's true that some roles have been removed, many persist (and new ones
just keep coming).

Processes management and security never die, nor should they. Groups of people
above a certain size need someone who is designated to make sure they work
efficiently and effectively with technology. Someone has to know that app is
out there before you can use it, and somebody needs to know how it works, what
the terms are, and how to back it up before you put all of your confidential
company data on it.

Hardware and configuration management will probably die with the PC (I hope),
but I think that may be more than 5 years out for most businesses.

Trainings work. Even glossy, easy-to-use software can benefit if someone knows
the use case and shares the possibilities with the users (surprisingly, not
everyone knows they _can_ share a link to a dropbox file).

Managing services is a lot more than just managing servers. Outsourcing stuff
(gmail, salesforce, whatever) or running it yourself (exchange) have both made
the lives of sysadmins a lot easier recently, but the config and integration
work just keeps growing. It makes sense because the more options exist, the
more work there is.

Not to mention that while we can do so much more with all of these new toys
than we could 5 years ago, your average user is still spending about the same
amount of time searching for it, signing up, getting it, learning it, and
googling when he can't figure out why it's not doing the thing it needs to do.

------
olegp
IT departments will exist but their role will change as the majority of
companies move towards SaaS.

At <https://starthq.com> we are working to make their job easier by making it
possible to manage the various SaaS apps, accounts and integrations.

------
xstockix
BS. This article seriously misjudges the amount of tech troglodytes in the
average corporate office.

------
volume
I want to say a few things:

* I also heard that "IT Doesn't Matter" - that article by Nicholas G. Carr from the early 2000's.

* yes there is an overarching trend towards the consumerization of IT, but also IT operations is bleeding into development via devops. Therefore did IT disappear or just evolve or migrate?

* basically the article says the business side of the house has more power nowadays and in the future as apps/processes get more cloudified. Or antoher way to put it, the business end gets more autonomous with what tools they use. a * you will still have IT people. Just they will be doing different things. possibly less skilled? So as we all know, they need to evolve or be crushed as we face a global race to the bottom for wages.

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snorkel
Any small/medium business should SaaS out as many traditional IT functions as
possible. But still you will always need someone technical to connect the dots
between all of the different services you rely on.

~~~
twistedpair
You only want your core competencies to be in house. Log backups and payroll
are not what differentiate you. They'll still be room for the mixers of the
special sauce on the inside given the ease with which IP can disappear in
other outsourcing countries.

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6d0debc071
_> In five years, McBride said, companies will have to ensure they're matching
their enabling technology to the demographic of that time._

The idea that you have to match your tech to the user in a company (at least
that closely) is a little bit silly. If they're not smart enough to learn to
use your new tech, they're not smart enough to work there at all. Fire them.

Unless it's like a burger bar or something I suppose. But really, they're
adults. This sort of 'All our works are mentally retarded' shtick is getting a
bit old.

~~~
_delirium
Not _all_ technologies are equivalent though. Different tech can have
different learning curves, and the shape/length of the learning curve for the
same technology can vary for different populations or types of work. I agree
that competent employees should be able to learn any technology you choose,
given sufficient time and training. But if you can do so without sacrificing
other important goals, typically a company will want to choose stuff that
their particular set of employees can learn more quickly, in a less error-
prone way, and with less training needed. To take an extreme case, if a
particular interface requires strong working knowledge of Python scripting to
use effectively, and your employees include a number of people who've never
programmed before, then the time and resources needed to train them up may be
large. On the other hand, if most of your employees are already Python
programmers, it may not be an issue at all.

~~~
6d0debc071
Well, by reasonable context. I'm sure we can all come up with fringe cases
where the thing's just a UI disaster. For any reasonably designed bit of
software though, it's hard to imagine it being hard to use - especially when
you've already used something in the same general class.

------
dodyg
ComputerWorld's "five years" is like Tom Friedman's "six months"
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_Unit>)

------
jroseattle
"Because we're switching from a desktop-based office productivity suite to an
online-based suite, we can expect the IT department to go away."

Said no one ever.

------
scorcher
Daft. Even if any company could just get its workers to manage their own IT
needs it doesn't mean its cost efficient. The average hourly wage of IT
support is often going to be less than the people they are supporting (i.e.
programmers managers). They are also a hell of a lot faster at doing things
since they do it every day

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coldcode
Right and Cobol vanished years ago.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Well, it kind of did: when was the last time you _saw_ Cobol? But that's just
a complicated way of saying "invisibility != nonexistence" ;)

~~~
kyllo
Yeah, I just used a COBOL app at work about an hour ago, but as far as I know
only a mysterious, nearly extinct secret society of wizards known as COBOL
Developers have access to see or touch the eldritch horror that is the source
code of this application, which is in fact older than I am.

COBOL didn't go anywhere. COBOL developers, on the other hand...

~~~
Piskvorrr
If it's secret, how can you tell it's extinct? For all you know, your
workplace might be teeming with secret wizards ;)

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linker3000
Great, we can redeploy all the techs to help us achieve the paperless office.

------
snowwrestler
Yes, they will. Companies are full of valuable data and computer security is
hard. That is the leading job of the IT department these days and will be for
decades to come.

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john_roberts
"Cars won't exist in five years." - Also valid. They will have morphed into a
new form with new technologies.

~~~
twistedpair
Funny how the future is rarely what people predict. I still love those GM
movie reels from 1955 about the flying cars of 1990. The future was planetary
exploration, rocket ships and flying cars. Easy access to information wasn't
even on the radar.

------
Beltiras
I'm reminded of <http://xkcd.com/927/>

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cpursley
Companies still have internal IT departments??

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joelthelion
If only...

