A Future Career in IT?

Written on June 26, 2007  |  by RP Mickler  |  Leave a Comment  | 

—–Original Message—–

From: Ricardo

Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2007 11:16 AM

It was a pleasure having you as a instructor and the class was a great addition to my educational status, thank you! Am I wasting my time seek a future in this industry and more so in security and if not what would suggest? Thank you for your time.

Ricardo

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Hey Ricardo -

Thank you, and you pose a great question.

It is my opinion that technology, over time, becomes more ubiquitous. That is to say that technology becomes easier to understand, deploy, and use; technologies that do not simplify like this are often eliminated from the market by Darwinian forces. If we are to believe this, then we can see that, ultimately, all technology is a commodity and will eventually be valueless.

We see this in the marketplace. Huge amounts of processing and memory and bandwidth capacity is offered at increasingly lower prices. And we see it in the labor market. Where five companies would hire five managers, five engineers, and five programmers, now we see that five companies may outsource to one manager, one engineer, and one programmer – and off-shoring is a very attractive option to achieve the highest quality at the lowest possible cost.

So given that, the future of IT in corporate environments looks bleak – IT is becoming a public utility, offered by cities and vendors for fractions of the cost (if not for free). Increasingly, IT departments are under pressure to prove value – to illustrate, in material terms, how they improve the bottom line. This is very difficult to prove; 72-percent of all IT projects fail, according to the Gartner Group, and budgets have increased on average perhaps 5-percent over the last 5 years – and that’s during an economic upturn. IT departments are busy trying to maximize economies of scale, do more with less, meet regulatory and business requirements, outsource itself, and constantly demonstrate value, even though it’s not given the budget to innovate, to create with technology.

Even in college campuses, we see IT programs enrollment falling significantly (except in game design). In fact, this is the real area of IT growth: IT not as a business utility, but, IT as an artistic medium. IT for design, for electronic media, for games and entertainment. This is where all of our new young talent is heading off to, and it just represents the ubiquity of the technology.

The problem isn’t connectivity or management or security or programming… it’s _content_. So, successful IT graduates will do very well in creative arts and in using the electronic medium as a pallet. There is huge demand for talent in this area, but, limited use for talent in the corporate world with IT.

Ultimately, even software will move to subscription-based licensing where a majority of commercial home and business applications will be hosted by 2nd parties. Microsoft is, right now, preparing for Windows Live – Windows ran across a browser, hosted by 3 massive server farms the size of football fields in Seattle to serve millions of customers… and managed by exactly 100 employees. Businesses, instead of having to buy licenses and install them on PC’s, will automatically receive Windows and Office through online subscriptions… PC’s become dumb terminals, no local server in a business, reduced risk for the business as all disaster recovery and security is pushed to the vendor, and the business completely abandons having any IT presence whatsoever – they rely on managed services that are like expensed utilities. And all physical and operations security will be managed by somebody else… those 100 employees (grin).

This may sound bad but there is a silver lining. New tech could be introduced that shifts this pattern and spurs more innovation – the energy issues we’re facing, for example, or, the need to move beyond silicon in chip processing… the race to beat Moore’s Law by 2018, for example. This could spawn rapid innovation and transfer more dollars to corporate IT, maybe even revitalize the industry. Things could, and very well might, change on a dime.

However, where everything is a commodity, there’s a constant problem of proving value. This is why IBM got out of the PC market – no money in consumer electronics. This is why I got out of running IT organizations – no fun in constantly reducing headcounts to meet budget projections and stifling innovation. All CIO’s are under increasing pressure to demonstrate value, or, partition the IT department and outsource large sections of it for cost savings.

And this is what you will face in this industry. How are you different from everybody else? From a 2nd party integrator/consultant? From a Guatemalan who can do the very same job, from Guatemala mind you, for $5.00/day? What differentiates you from the mass of other options and choices a company has? How do you use _content_? Is your skill with IT blended with something else that brings value – like an understanding of business processes? How are you positioned for the baby boomer release in the next 10-15 years – will companies want you, your skillset, your talent, and why? All of these are pertinent questions and relate to your answer.

Watch for massive restructuring when the boomer-generation leaves the ranks in the next 10-15 years. My guess is that corporations will actually eliminate or massively reduce their existing IT footprints at this time as the old-guard leaves. I could be wrong – but I do believe that most firms, who do not consider IT a core competency and just want IT as a utility, would be more than happy to get the same capability but at greatly reduced liability and expense… i.e., through a vendor instead of hosting it themselves.

Finally, security. A future in the IT security industry. I believe, Ricardo, that technology becomes easier to use over time, more ubiquitous. The phone, for example, is entirely secure and you don’t need special training to use it. Online banking, entirely secure, no training; ATM’s, cell phones… security is all around us, wrapped into the tech we use and the products we buy… but very very few people actually _handle_ security or need to _know_ about it. It’s just part of the fabric. If you ask me, security and best practices of IT Governance – ultimately – will just become part of the fabric (grin).

R