The IT department is dead

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/010708-carr-it-dead.html

by iamelgringo • 19 years ago

11 11 19 years ago

Tichy• 19 years ago

Hm, I don't know?? Sure, standard things like email can be outsourced, but isn't IT in theory a blueprint for the business processes in the company? Would that mean that all companies would be the same? I don't think that will happen.

mynameishere• 19 years ago

Oh, right. The cloud. Whatever.

umjames• 19 years ago

How will data that should be private and well-protected (like health and financial information) work in this "cloud"?

Besides, most IT departments relish complicated proprietary "enterprise" technology for job-security reasons. They're not going to tell the CEO that they're no longer relevant, not when IT is already viewed as a cost center.

edw5192• 19 years ago

"They're not going to tell the CEO that they're no longer relevant"

No, the shareholders will when the "cost center" starts eating into their dividends.

trekker7• 19 years ago

Yahoo and Microsoft will trust their data with Google?

Besides this problem, I think he is right.

staunch• 19 years ago

Most of what internal IT departments do is act as support. They mediate the non-technical workers relationship with technology. That's not going away just because the servers happen to be a few extra miles away.

edw5192• 19 years ago

I agree.

This is the same argument for microcomputers 25 years ago. IT departments fought against them because they feared losing control. They were foisted upon the organization by users that refused to wait months (and years) for apps, so they made their own.

The same thing is happening again, only this time it will be much, much faster. You don't need much budget approval to get it done in the "cloud".

henning2• 19 years ago

"Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people."

lulz! Typical employees can't even keep their Windows systems free of spyware. Suddenly they're interested in "controlling the processing of information directly"?

And how is this cloud utility computing going to work? Web applications? A monster JavaScript hack is going to replace Excel? Not anytime soon, especially for hardcore users.

As long as someone accidentally backing a truck into a power cable in San Francisco can immediately take down a third of these bratty little Web 2.0 outfits, little of what Carr says is going to transpire anytime soon. (It doesn't matter, even if your quarterly report is due in 8 hours - this is WEB 2.0!!!)

Oh, and good luck getting companies off Exchange Server.

jimbokun• 19 years ago

"Typical employees can't even keep their Windows systems free of spyware."

He also predicts the demise of the PC.

"As long as someone accidentally backing a truck into a power cable in San Francisco can immediately take down a third of these bratty little Web 2.0 outfits, little of what Carr says is going to transpire anytime soon."

You can make the same argument for on-site power generation. That didn't keep companies from using the power grid.

"Oh, and good luck getting companies off Exchange Server."

This is actually a good point, for reasons of compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, etc. Corporations likely want tight control of email for legal reasons, at least for now. If that gets solved by an off-site email provider to the satisfaction of corporate attorneys, on-site Exchange installations won't last long, either.

henning2• 19 years ago

Demise of the PC? To be replaced by what? Thin clients?

Will it maintain backward compatibility with all the unmaintained proprietary software people use to run businesses? Probably not (Windows is very unhip and everyone uses Linux).

Weren't thin clients supposed to take over long ago?

I think everything he says will eventually happen, just not soon.

"You can make the same argument for on-site power generation. That didn't keep companies from using the power grid."

A major selling point of these stupid data centers is supposed to be their high uptime and resilience against power problems. What went down is a data center, and that killed dozens of hip Web 2.0 services. If all your computing stuff is in the cloud and a major part of the cloud goes down, you have no computing and you have absolutely no control over the situation, because after all, the data center never goes down. Oh well, you're doing what the pundits tell you to!

I'm fucking sick of how people on this site don't care that web applications often have shitty uptime.

enigman• 19 years ago

Uh-huh. This guy Carr reminds me of the famous New Yorker cartoon showing two scientists standing at a blackboard. On the left and right are a bunch of equations, and in the middle, connecting the left-side with the right-side is a cloud labeled "then a miracle occurs"...

See it here: http://www.cartoonbank.com/product_details.asp?sid=40967

Or maybe he was the screenwriter of the movie "Independence Day" who thought that genius hacker Jeff Goldblum could easily connect his earthling laptop to the alien mother-computer and inject a virus that would destroy all their critical systems. Great cinema, lousy computer theory.

I work for a high-priced technical consulting company and regularly work closely with a number corporate 1000 companies. Guess what? Their problems are complex, their systems and applications are complex and wildly divergent (even when comparing companies within the same industry), and their management and IT people exhibit vastly different levels of skill. It is far from being a cookie-cutter world out there, and Carr is a fool for implying otherwise.

Carr is making a living by being controversial and inflammatory. He should spend more time on the ground actually working closely with some IT organizations and get to know their problems... then let's see if he believes this nonsense then (assuming he's even capable of understanding the details of what his IT friends actually do from day to day).

Shame on any execs who actually swallow this bilge...

The IT department is dead

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