IT departments won't exist in five years | Hacker News Reader

IT departments won't exist in five years

computerworld.com

31 pointsilamont51 comments

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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...

I'd say quite a bit more has changed. Aside from the huge growth of cloud services (Google Apps, Office 365, Amazon EC2 private clouds, etc), the explosion of bring-your-own-device policies, and the enormous advances in connectivity (10 years ago a mid-sized office often had a T1. Now we have dual-500mps connections), consider that most software stacks are completely virtualized now (and anything that isn't is on the short track to being so).

That changes everything. Suddenly an external vendor can provide your entire hardware platform, whether by dropping in their own managed hardware solution, or by hooking you into their cloud via a dedicated connection, and that's just for the few outliers that aren't provide as SaaS.

The world has completely changed, from a networking, platform, and device perspective. I am perplexed by some of the comments to this article, and have to believe it is a bit of a head-in-the-sand approach.

Do I think IT will be gone in 5 years? Hardly. But change is coming at a ferocious pace, and those who ignore it do so at their own peril.

Indeed. I have meant "the only thing that has changed in the article are the buzzwords"; the industry is of course very different from what it was in 2000.

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.

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.

More precisely, "less IT for that one task, while the number of IT tasks grows ever larger".

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.

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.

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.

I covered everything you brought up with this:

> Small companies don't necessarily need an IT department

You're bringing up examples of small companies not needing complexity. Sure. No disagreement there. But they don't have IT departments today either generally.

This article was asserting that IT departments as a whole are going away, and if you've spent any time in or around enterprise IT you should know this is bullshit for a million reasons.

And off-siting your stuff doesn't make it so that the CEO can manage it.

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.

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.

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.

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

Oh, come on: you mean that I can't just tell the computer "Do What I Mean" and have it accomplished?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I saw this from Sam Altman a few months back: http://blog.samaltman.com/software-to-avoid-the-software-peo...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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

Right and Cobol vanished years ago.

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

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...

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

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

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.

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

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.

I'm reminded of http://xkcd.com/927/

Companies still have internal IT departments??

If only...

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