Over the past decade the increasing availability of reliable high speed globally connected networks and the decreasing cost of affordable computing power has had profound impact on IT operations that have facilitated the acceleration of a number of trends.
Traditional Outsourcing: In an effort to reduce costs, IT support and software development functions that don’t require face to face human interaction or physical contact with equipment are being outsourced to remote third parties who in turn need access to internal systems.
Web based software as a service (SaaS): Universal access to vendor managed standardized general administration software systems has reduced setup costs considerably. It has also made the price of expansion and support more linear and predictable. Forklift technology refreshes and major capital expenditures to add the ability to expand in future will be less likely to occur. There are many examples of this with any service that you can implement online such as retail banking, tax preparation, software purchase and downloading, contact management, and gaming falling into this category,
Virtualization: In an effort to maximize utilization efficiencies and provisioning flexibility, the transparent sharing and movement of software locations, and the data paths it uses, has been facilitated by increasingly faster hardware and more capable support systems. Virtual circuits, virtual LANs and virtual operating systems are now commonplace.
Convergence: Speedier hardware and more adept software have also made it possible to create single devices with multiple discrete roles. Load balancers, firewalls and VPNs functionality that used to be separate now often reside on the same device. Both phone and storage systems now operate using shared network equipment and voicemail can be retrieved from your email system.
Appliances: The need to understand the intricacies of many applications is being diminished as vendors create purpose built server systems with preconfigured software with web interfaces. Firewall, load balancer, wireless, authentication, intrusion detection, mail delivery, and administration systems are often available on platforms built on this model.
Cloud Computing: Internally created strategic, customized software is being migrated to vendor facilities where automated provisioning and virtualization is used to manage the servers on which it runs. Many small businesses use cloud service providers such as Google, Amazon, and Rackspace to lower their operational costs by outsourcing virtualization to them.
RFP-lite speed sourcing: The internet provides instant transparency into market and competitor developments. IT organizations will be expected to find solutions to a new competitive landscape without the luxury of developing detailed requirements documentation, clearly defined vendor specifications or selection criteria. This involves preselecting a few competing Tier 1 providers to create working prototypes based on high level requirements defined in an eventual contract with only key terms and conditions. Time consuming supporting details are refined afterwards in supporting contracts. This creates two tiers of bureaucracy, one swift, the other more measured and comprehensive.
Not only do we have a rapidly changing environment, but we also have rapidly changing technology necessitating a redefinition of the staffing roles of everyone in the IT operations function. The impact initially felt by entry level support staff in corporate IT is now affecting more senior staff in both corporate and web operations.
Valued IT operations staff will be those who are flexible in their roles, generous in their knowledge transfer, aware of new technologies, able to proactively evaluate their impact to the business, confident in making sound business cases for their deployment and capable of implementations in a timely manner. They will increasingly become integration engineers with an understanding of strategic architectural principles. The days of the pure network, security, or systems administration engineer are over. Expect networking, telephony and security functions to start becoming sub-disciplines of systems administration as the application support teams take increasing control of the data path both on premises and in outsourced SaaS and cloud environments. The stakeholders with whom they interact will also change to include a wide variety of third parties. As interpersonal interaction increases so will the need to hire staff with good people skills will become a key ingredient for success.
Don’t think that the IT generalist will kill the IT specialist. Instead we will see the rise of multi-disciplinary specialists with long term planning and project management talents in the guise of the generalist. It will be a hybrid skill set merging the curricula of community colleges, IT certification programs and under graduate MIS degrees. Expect active corporate involvement in the same way we see it in traditional engineering and software development disciplines to meet this need.
If we fail to modify the way we use our people and processes in the pursuit of exploiting new technology then we will fail.
