The changing nature of Information Technology

I’ve been lucky enough to be in our industry for the last 17 or so years and I have seen all sorts of changes, as we all have. If I think back to my days as a research assistant at a university using the engineering lab Sparcs to create lab reports and pass emails back and forth with other researchers, I’d never have envisioned helping to design and run a system that would send out more than six million customized emails per hour less than ten years later.

In the early 90s IT departments, if you could call them that for most organizations, were necessary evils, a band of misfits who toted various cables and dongles and floppies around to who knew what ends. Today IT is at the heart of several large industries, the difference between successful, profitable businesses and those on the bubble. We’ve seen the industry evolve from sysadmins being a bunch of doctoral and master’s students to kids graduating from high school knowing how to program in a number of languages with a CCNA certification. When I try to imagine what the next 17 years will bring I’m mystified to be honest, the change has been rapid and amazing.

There are a lot of challenges facing us as we move forward as a profession. The interconnectedness of today’s market means that everyone wants access to everything, NOW. Cell phones are becoming viable compute platforms, they are fitting 32 cores on a chip and we have a pretty ubiquitous, fast fabric tying most of it together. At the same time there is more regulation now that pretty much the sum of recorded history to about five years ago. My colleague, Chuck Hollis, talks a lot about the need for a CFO of Information, I think he’s on the right track. But that new position requires tools for reporting and analysis that cut across the many silos that make up IT and the heterogeneous infrastructures supporting them.

No IT framework like ITIL or COBIT or MOF will act as a silver bullet, no off the shelf Resource Management system will give you all the insight you need, no new analyst acronym like GRC will encapsulate everything you need to worry about. A change in the way we design, implement and manage our infrastructure is required to ensure that IT continues to be a source of business value and not just a cost center, or worse the place were Information goes to become confused, lost and irrelevant.

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