Like many of yuo I also received the email this morning from CIO Insight’s heralding “Huge Changes for IT”. I quickly cleared all the important emails from my inbox, then I perused the other emails for interesting things to read and explore. I clicked through the resulting 15 page presentation and found that, in general, it made a lot of sense. There were some areas that warrant explanation, such as “less than 25% of those employed in IT will remain there” but I found a huge inconsistency in the conclusion; or worse, a huge complication that arises due to them, that will inhibit the realization of some of the said conclusions.
Slide 2: “Many activities will devolve to business units, be consolidated with other central functions such as HR and finance, or be externally sourced”. Is this really that new? I think not. For many organizations “Data Processing” was originally a finance function. I guess we might be going around in circles? But of course, there are huge drivers of “consumerization of IT” but this does not mean the “death of IT” – it just means that more folks will know what IT can do and more folks will be “doing IT” to help with their work. That sounds like a good thing for “IT”; but it might be seen as a challenge to those organizations that view “IT” as a part of the dictatorial, top-down, management style of the 70’s and 80’s.
Slide 6: “Ubiquitous Data – The rise of “smart” mobile devices and “ubiquitous sensing” will drive an exponential increase in data volume and throughput”. I can’t disagree with this, and there is a lot of Gartner research that has been saying this now for many years; and more recently the focus on this areas has increased. But is the rise in the growth of data, and the increasing rise of data, that new? No, I think not. What is exciting is that the devices creating this stuff changes and expands every year!
The complication I am about to site comes from the past. Our legacy is a complex mess of heterogeneous systems and process used to support business and organization requirements. We have all been “at this” for many years. The result: short term we (IT) met business needs, overall (let’s not go into the specific of “success” versus “failure” – I hope you get the point); whereas long term, we have sown the seeds of potential failure. As a result of building systems that met the needs of the moment, many IT shops now spend too much of their budget on “keeping the train running on time” and there is not much money left to “lay new train tracks”. This is where we are today – and one reason why things like MDM are hot.
But, what happens if “IT” becomes consumerized and every user in our organizations starts to “do” IT, and select and implement technology to support their “needs of the moment”? Doesn’t that create a possible conflict between:
a) the demand side of the equation that drives to ever greater existence of IT in ever greater forms of granularity, and
b) the supply side of the equation that seeks to create leverage and synchronization of business data semantics so that the silos can work with each other?
Should we assume that the “Semantic Web” will magically emerge at our desks? Will the increase in occurrence of systems that appear in our businesses in the next few years magically integrate and share semantic with each other? Isn’t it the case that even when we have apparent control of this stuff we still cant achieve this level of semantic consistency or interoperability?
I think the two predictions create a conflict. I suspect that both will lead to a third: That some aspect of IT needs to remain “shared” and “centralized” even if its tentacles spread across the organization. I think this is a nuance that has not yet been thought out, at least not by the CIO Insight article.
What do you think?