Some people are predicting the end of things in 2012. ZapThink is giving enterprise IT up to eight years beyond that, however. Jason Bloomberg recently published a set of predictions — or “crisis points” — pertaining to the fate of enterprise IT within the next 10 years.
If enterprises ‘rush to offload IT,’ will they regret it?
Three of Jason’s predictions give enterprise IT managers pause: the impending collapse of enterprise IT, enterprise application crash, and the fall of frameworks.
Regarding the collapse of enterprise IT, Jason says it won’t be fashionable for non-IT businesses to be doing IT. He says by analogy, enterprises use office furniture, “but nobody would think of manufacturing their own.” He adds that it will be surprising “just how fast enterprises rush to offload their entire IT organizations.”
Jason promises more details on how this will roll out. However, not everybody agrees that enterprise IT is a vanishing breed. Michael Poulin, for one, begs to differ. Ship out your IT, and risk bringing down your entire enterprise, he warns. “The blindness of the executives who do it now is the really astonishing thing, especially when the ‘pioneers’ are starting to feel the pain and frustration from what they did,” he says.
“Business that ’stop doing their own IT, and furthermore, move their outsourced IT off-premise’ make a step back in their competitiveness in the market…. I am saying that the enterprise, if it wants to live a long good life, has to keep its IT in house.”
I agree that there is a competitive advantage that a well-integrated IT strategy can provide, and would like to add the following points:
- Businesses that include CIOs or IT executives as part of their top-tier executive committees are tapping into a tremendous resource. Companies I’ve spoken to that include CIOs in strategic decision-making tend to be very adept at leveraging technology as a go-to-market weapon.
- The lines between non-IT companies and vendors are blurring, and will get fuzzier. As discussed on previous occasions at this blogsite, all enterprises (IT and non-IT businesses alike) are becoming both providers and consumers of services. This calls for robust capabilities to offer services across partner networks and the Internet at large, as well as to be able to consume services.
- Just because a lot of technology resources may reside outside the organization doesn’t mean an enterprise won’t need tech-savvy executives that know how to make the most of technology. Such individuals are needed more than ever, to help identify and coordinate both internal and external technology-based services. Someone needs to know this stuff, and how it can apply to this business. (See the first point.)
So, yes, it will be the end of enterprise IT as we know it, but not the end of IT. If anything, a more strategic and partnership role.
Jason also talked about the collapse of frameworks will come about as organizations press their enterprise architects to deliver rapid solutions to business problems, rather then getting “bogged down in the details, spending time with various frameworks and other artifacts, to the point where the value they provide to their organizations is unclear.” Frameworks lead to “checklist architectures,” he says. Regarding applications, “the days of ‘Big ERP’ are numbered,” he says.
UPDATE: I just posted a guest piece over at the Informatica Perspectives site discussing the impact of private cloud development on IT departments. There tends to be angst, as there is with any major change. But, ultimately, new avenues of opportunities open up as well.
