The days of companies needing someone to "fix their computers" or "maintain their systems" are coming to a close. You don't need the equivalent of a computer plumber around your Small business or your house. At the least you'll need less of them. Cloud services and stateless devices will render the days of needing your computer fixed into history like needing your horses shoed . Local storage will only be a cache of what's on the web and if your computer breaks you'll just replace it login and everything will be just like you left it.
This process will continue into services like email, and even line of business software. The highest and best use for those people and resources is in a consolidated company where all they do is email, or file sharing or data and storage managerial and sell those services, it's really what's most efficient for everyone.
Real IT people will need to prove their worth by taking their company to levels beyond what can be achieved in the open market. Your company doesn't need you anymore to pick out the best email, or the best laptops. If your company had IT to just keep things running the good news is you won't need them much longer. Small business will have all newest technology pushed on them from their suppliers, vendors and business partners. The bad news is that you'll then be like everyone else. The good news is you can take those dollars and reallocate them into not being told what to do but innovating into real market differentiators so you can tell others what to do.
1 comment:
I feel that this article is a little out of touch with reality.
I am VERY grateful that so many services can be ‘outsourced’ to the web. Personally I feel like GMail and GDocs are better quality tools that Outlook and Office in 99% of use cases.
However, there will be a need for an IT department as long as users sit at desks with computers that closely resemble any modern day desktop / laptop.
There will ALWAYS be hardware problems, there will likely always be software that simply isn’t well suited to the web (analytical apps, scientific apps, etc).
Who is going to manage the Google apps accounts? Who is going to manage the cloud hosted apps? Who is going to even CHOOSE which hosted apps to use? And more importantly, who is going to address the day-to-day concerns of the average users in companies with thousands of employees?
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