If anything, I write about a lot of different topics. Maybe not particularly well, but people tell me there's no shortage of breadth ;-)
Someone suggested that maybe I bump it up a level, and try to summarize and integrate some of the key trends that are making us all think really hard these days. You know, tie together the big threads and create a short, comprehensive picture.
So, I'm going to give it a try -- let me know how I do?
Change Is Constant
And that's not unique to IT. Whatever your role in life is, you'd better be prepared to re-learn what it means to do what you do every so often.
And when we look at the forces impacting IT, even a partial list is considerable:
* supporting new information-based business models on a global scale
* new information governance responsibilities
* enabling a new knowledge-based workforce that wants to search, analyze and collaborate in new ways
* a restructuring of the IT value chain: outsourcing, SaaS, vendor offerings
* entirely new categories of IT architectures to consider and perhaps implement
* and, of course, more demanding business units that want new capabilities, delivered faster, more reliably and at a much lower cost than before
Other than that, it's business-as-usual in the IT department ;-)
If you poke around on this blog, you'll find dozens and dozens of posts on different aspects of the themes above, so maybe it's worthwhile to summarize what's going on in each of these.
New Information-Based Business Models
One interesting way to think about these changes is look at where information comes from, and where it goes.
Applications and information flows started with individual business functions, e.g. manufacturing, HR, etc. We then realized that linking this stuff across business units was really important -- enterprise business applications for transactional data, collaboration and repository applications for unstructured content.
The next wave seems to be externalizing that information flow even further -- linking up with your vendors, outsourcers and collaborators that are outside your company, and linking up with with your customers and communities in new ways.
The high-value stuff seems to be collaboration, communities and content (3 C's?). And traditional IT groups struggle with opening up their IT infrastructure (and their information!) to outside parties.
Back to an old analogy: information is like money.
If you've studied macroeconomics, money is more valuable the faster it moves -- it's about flows, not static piles. You deposit money in the bank, they loan it to someone else, who invests in it something, and so on.
Of course, you don't want to lose any of it ;-)
Most companies sit in the middle of a value-chain between their suppliers and their customers. They're going to be under real pressure to connect with those endpoints in more useful and productive ways.
Finding the changing tradeoffs between increasing value, and protecting value is going to be interesting to watch.
New Information Governance Responsibilities
I've written about this one at length -- I think it's one of the most fundamental shifts in IT responsibility over the next few years. And it seems to be one of the hardest ones for people who've been in the industry a while to wrap their heads around.
It's simple -- information is like money (again). IT's going to have to start thinking more like the CFO of information, "own" the entire information portfolio, and find ways to save money, make money and stay out of trouble.
The "staying out of trouble" piece is perhaps the most vexing -- the consequences for poor information management are essentially unbounded. And nobody likes unbounded risks.
The New Workforce
We're becoming a society of knowledge workers. Anything that's transactional has been either automated, outsourced or offshored -- or will be soon. I believe that $1 of investment in making transactions work better pales in value compared to $1 of investment in making a knowledge worker more productive.
We want reports and analysis (think data warehousing and business intelligence).
We want to collaborate and communicate in new ways, both with each others, and people outside of our companies (think email, content management, social media, etc.).
We want to find things we're interested in quickly and without fuss (think enterprise search, authoritative tagging, etc.)
We want to use our brains better, and use the brains of others. It's building the social computer.
It goes without saying that this workforce is mobile, and is getting somewhat comfortable with blurred lines between "work" and "life".
Don't make the mistake of thinking it's a generational thing, either. I'm meeting more and more people who are -- ahem -- a bit more seasoned that are demanding to work in this new paradigm.
The New IT Value Chain
At a classical level, the IT value chain was pretty easy to understand. IT figured out what the business wanted, bought stuff, made it work, and supported it. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Those days are fading fast. There's strong interest in applications as a service. More contractors and consultants than ever before. Selective outsourcing is gaining new strength. Vendors are taking on more responsibility to make stuff integrate, make it work and deliver tangible results, rather than just sell stuff.
The "guts" of IT are being hollowed out, and given to other companies that specialize and are really, really good at what IT needs to get done.
Is this a bad thing? No, I don't think so, but it's a different way of working.
As an example, I've worked with hyper-productive marketing groups that are only a few people. But behind them, there's an army of service providers who are darn good at what they do. And these groups operate at a proficiency level that's almost impossible to match with building huge marketing teams.
Makes you think a bit about how you go about building an organization when you see things like that.
New IT Architectures
Even once you filter out all the meaningless buzzwords, there are some pretty major changes afoot in how IT stuff gets built.
Applications (and IT management) are getting decomposed and re-orchestrated in new ways. Call it SOA, Web 2.0, model-based management, etc. -- the idea is the same: closed stacks are bad, open components are good.
And, as a result, we'll never look at an application (or a management tool) the same way again.
Virtualization of compute resources is sweeping through server-based apps, and has just started to transform what we call a "desktop". Yes, you save money, but more people are starting to realize that the productivity and flexibility benefits are potentially an order-of-magnitude better.
Embrace virtualization, you think of IT infrastructure in a very different, on-demand kind of way.
EMC has made a big bet that the security focus will change from perimeter to information-centric. We'll secure stuff by discovering it, wrapping it in a secure envelope, hand out keys selectively to when and where it's needed, and be able to audit the results.
That kind of perspective changes what we mean by "security" in a very fundamental way.
And, looming over the horizon, is "grid" redefined -- the "cloud" -- vast, distributed networks of compute and information resources, delivered over increasingly reliable and pervasive bandwidth, at a scale that can't fit into a traditional data center.
And More IT-Savvy Business Users
I remember a time when IT could get away with being the high priests of the secret IT society. "You don't understand how complicated all this stuff is" was an easy way to keep aggressive business users at bay.
Well, these non-IT people have become much more savvy. Business people realize that information is the most powerful tool at their disposal to solve business problems. They read, they learn, they talk with their peers, they engage with vendors -- they're becoming extremely knowledgeable about what's possible, and what other people are doing.
As a result, I see more and more IT organizations becoming more transparent to their constituencies, and engaging in honest, collaborative dialog around challenges, opportunities and strategies.
Of course, the expectation is do more, do it faster, do it cheaper and do it more reliably -- that goes without saying.
But if that's the "what", what's changing is the "how".
Information is becoming the single most important asset in the business, period.
And it's not just an IT thing anymore.
Good one, Chuck. Another item that is talked about a lot but which I think we're only just beginning to understand is the global dimension. The offshoring-for-cost trend has morphed into globalsourcing-for-expertise, and the result is a massive cross-cultural coordination/collaboration problem. All of a sudden we're in a world where the component parts of IT/business processes are distributed globally. IT is pretty well set up now to deal with the network communications and time zone aspects of this, but not so much on language, culture, etc. Everybody I talk to is struggling with some dimension of this. To "use the brains of others" as you put it, or build the "social computer", somehow you have to first develop understanding of the cultures those other brains came from...
Posted by: Tom | December 16, 2007 at 10:54 AM
Hi Tom -- you're right, I missed this big one.
Not only do I see the effect you're talking about in spades, I also see IT organizations struggle miserably to "open up" their castles to allow the organization to work productively with others.
Not a week goes by when I don't meet someone who's struggling with this issue -- they need to collaborate globally, but their IT model assumes that no one can be trusted.
Hard to say which way this one goes!
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | December 17, 2007 at 09:02 AM