I read Michael Krigsman's blog entry titled "Is IT becoming extinct?", and had to wonder what his definition of IT really was?? If he views IT as a technology focused organization that is separate from the core business, I'd probably agree, but if we're talking about IT being the use of information and knowledge to maximize value delivery, than he couldn't be farther from the truth. Vinnie wrote a response to Michael's entry in his blog as well.

What is true is the enterprise use of information and knowledge is changing. We're having greater degrees of collaboration and customized use of information, similar to the changes that came from the introduction of the personal computer. We're moving through a stage focused on virtualization to one with much greater use of SaaS and cloud computing techniques. We're moving to a deeper understanding of the intersection of enterprise as well as personal context. With all the new compute cycles being made available, we're going to use them in ways that were never possible before.

Michael's arguments about services becoming a commodity are true, as long as we're talking about commodity services. My perspective is that fewer compute cycles are going to be spent on commodity services in the future, when compared with what organizations will use on understanding context and simulating impact of changes. I doubt that anyone should view the skills needed to accomplish those tasks as low value. They are definitely IT, but just a different IT than what we're talking about today. 

Social media is definitely going to have an impact. For the larger organization, the IT organization will be deeply involved in this. Collaborative environments are moving to SaaS approaches at a faster rate than the core business systems, but if you start to integrate those collaboration systems into the enterprise processes, moving to a new level of value generation and latency reduction, the commodity solutions are not up to the task. The vendors of these services are likely to remain unwilling to support the level of customization and SLAs required for the foreseeable future. We'll have to see what level of integration they will support going forward, since SOA should allow that to take place. Other business solutions are also going down the SaaS path, but if the consuming organization views tight integration as a differentiator, a commodity solution may not suffice.

There are numerous other arguments in his article, and it is important for each organization to review and determine what impact they would have. In most cases though, it will be the IT organization that does the review. They need to actively decide where to spend their resources. For some, SaaS and other techniques will provide significant value and the pendulum will swing and hopefully reach equilibrium at some point that meets the organizations needs. What there is no problem agreeing with is: those IT organization not focused on delivering ever increasing business value ("caretakers") and actively making decisions about their future will be extinct, since someone will step in and make decision for them or their company.

Charlie Bess
EDS' Next Big Thing Blog