Filed under: Business, Features, Analysis
Three reasons IT departments are shrinking
Outsourcing - Whether it's customer service or application hosting, outsourcing is becoming more and more prevalant in the corporate IT world. Avoiding the financial overhead associated with running certain IT functions internally is often impetus for choosing to outsource. For instance, companies are presented with a choice between running e-mail in-house (pay IT staff salary and benefits, purchase servers and software, and find quality rack space) or outsourcing it to, for example, Google Apps which is free (though ad-supported) and includes popular groupware features like calendars, web pages, document sharing, etc. Similarly, sites like Salesforce.com can offer full customer-relationship management (CRM) software online for a fraction of the respective overhead required to run CRM in a company IT department.
Lack of IT staff
Imagine being a future IT professional deciding what to do after high school. Should you go to a trade school to learn vendor-neutral technologies and theories? Do you go to college to learn about "data structures" and "human factors in information systems" all while reading Shakespeare and learning about World War II? Or do you forgo higher education and go for vendor-specific certifications (MCSE, CCNA, etc.)? Often a decision must be made: depth or breadth.
Should I learn about Windows, *Nix, Mac, mainframes (e.g. AS/400) but only know a little bit about each? Or should I become a hardcore Unix admin and know the ins and outs of Unix but hardly anything about Windows or AS/400?
With so many options, IT professionals are usually either too specialized or have a skill set too broad to help a corporation. Combine that with job-related complaints like "I'm only recognized when something is broken" and "I'm stuck maintaining systems, unable to innovate or enrich the business" and you end up with a lackluster IT field.
Less frequent system-wide changes
In recent years, IT staff have been relegated to maintaining the status quo instead of researching/procuring/implementing new systems.The span of time between operating system upgrades has gradually increased, and a lot of everyday business can be done via the Internet meaning a web browser update can fix lots of issues.
Then, of course, there is the Vista example. Few corporations are shelling out the time and money to upgrade their workstations to Vista. Besides the slew of reported bugs and poor performance of Vista, many businesses simply ask, "Why do we need it?"
There is little compelling reason for companies to upgrade from XP, which leaves IT professionals to maintain OS's they've been managing for years. Bored yet?
As corporate IT departments downsize, IT staff may find safe haven in the large data centers and global networks which will run many of the world's business services. Until then, companies will continue to outsource more technology services while future IT professionals attempt to gain employment at companies who understand the future of those services--like Google.