As I have mentioned before, my day job is in enterprise IT. I work helping some of the largest companies in the world upgrade their IT to match the demands of their business. I have argued before that there is a simply ridiculous amount of waste in corporate IT and that I expect this waste to dwindle rapidly.
I was having a discussion with a colleague the other day and a clearer way to present the waste in IT occurred to me in the form of the graph above. The green line represents the rate at which companies are gaining access to new technologies. The red line represents their competency in deploying these technologies. The level of waste in IT is directly tied to the distance between the red and green lines (assuming the green line is above the red line). When this happens, you have CIOs who are flying by the seat of their pants. They don’t actually understand the technologies that their company is attempting to implement, so they waste money figuring it out. They don’t know how to hire people to manage the technology once it is implemented, so they hire three people hoping one is competent. I could keep going about how not knowing costs them, but I think you can see the point.
The good news (or bad news if you’re one of the leaches making money off the waste in IT) is that both the technology and the skill of the people managing/implementing it are changing.
- The pace of new technology is slowing. This is particularly true in the corporate IT space. Let’s be honest, the way you use your computer at work has not changed fundamentally in the last few years. Neither has the way your IT department provides it. Virtualization has had an effect, increasing the efficiencies of deployment, but this is nothing like changing from a mainframe terminal to a PC or even like changing from floppy disks and CDs to shares on network attached storage. This is why the green line has leveled out somewhat*. This is giving IT organizations a chance to catch up with technology.
- Those IT organizations are getting more comfortable with IT. The CIOs that are being named today had computers in college. The ones that will be named CIOs in 10 years will have used computers to do research as early as 5th grade. These CIOs will have a better understanding for what they do and don’t know about technology and will increase the slope of the red line.
The bottom line is this. Enterprise IT budgets will not keep increasing at the rate they have in the past and enterprise IT organizations are going to be much leaner and meaner. If your IT organization can’t keep pace with this kind of advance, you should be seeking help from your favorite cloud provider ASAP. If you’re an IT professional and you don’t think you have a home in a leaner IT environment then you should be polishing the resume or heading back to school. If you’re working for an IT vendor that relies on a spiffy sale pitch intended for the wasteful CIO, you better look for another company. However, if you’re rooting for an efficient American (and international) economy that can get more done with less, you’re in luck.
*If you’re wondering why I didn’t call out the future spike in the green line that occurs at its very end, it’s because it’s not related to the point I’m making in this post. If you’re curious why it’s there; I believe that as the techniques behind social media advance, there will be an extremely rapid advancement in what this “new” internet can do. For more thoughts on that, see this old post.
