The end of the IT department? I don’t think so
There have been a number of simplistic and naive media and blogosphere articles recently predicting the demise of the corporate IT department, due to the rise of on-demand applications (SaaS) delivered over the web. These predictions are wrong on many levels.
The most simplistic idea is that these wonderful new tools will enable dissatisfied users to break away from the shackles of the in-house IT department. I seem to recall similar comments with the rise of easier programming languages, the advent of minicomputers and then PCs with tools like Excel and Access. True, users can do more on their own. But most end up coming back under IT’s care for a very good reason - users don’t want to be IT guys maintaining and supporting live applications, even less so when they become mission-critical.
Actually most don’t want to get involved with the hard work of implementing new ones either. Here’s the next flaw in the user empowerment idea. Setting up an application to drive your sales force, your accounting, your collaboration and knowledge base, or just the internal email and calendars isn’t just a case of turning on Salesforce.com or Zoho. Ask anyone who’s led a major implementation in a large organisation. Almost inevitably it quickly becomes apparent that the design and implementation details which need to established for any group/shared application require analysts, testers and trainers, not to mention project management. That skill resides in IT more than anywhere else.
And I haven’t begun to talk about user administration, security, audit and legal compliance, business continuity, etc, etc, etc.
I absolutely agree there is a place for end-user empowerment, but I think people confuse that with the tools, which are available for corporate IT to deploy as well. Whatever the tools, core business systems will still require careful design and implementation of company specific realisation, process, integration, security, integrity and compliance. And that’s a specialist skill – which is why we have IT depts. Users just don’t want to do that stuff, and why should they?
The arrival of SaaS changes little apart from the delivery mechanism. Although managing server farms is likely to diminish (to a greater or lesser extent is still moot), in-house IT will continue in its major role - selecting, implementing, integrating and supporting applications for their business users and their users’ core processes.
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March 3rd, 2008 at 9:00 am
Jim - as one of the “naive and simplistic” commentators I thought it incumbent on myself to comment. I’m not in the camp that believe that IT departments will cease to exist anytime soon - due to the rise of cloud computing or any other reason. What I do believe is that self created silos and empires within IT departments will begun to be broken down as end users have the ability to be more deterministic about their solution sets.
So - SaaS/Cloud computing will (hopefully) spell the end of siloed and non user-focussed IT departments but will be the momentum towards IT departments becoming more value adding partners of end users. learly some/much of the implementation/support mechanism of IT will be rendered unnecessary by third party/outsourced software delivery.
You say that “The most simplistic idea is that these wonderful new tools will enable dissatisfied users to break away from the shackles of the in-house IT department” - I’m not sure how you can disagree with this. To a certain extent a project team utilising Google Apps, Zoho or some other SaaS product does enable them to move away from corporate IT set directives.
I’ve seen this in effect within a large Telco where various project teams implement project and group specific solutions at will, often because corporate IT is too resource poor/unwilling to do similarly.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:25 am
On an enterprise scale I agree. But on a team level the situation can be a lot different… as Ben said, “corporate IT is too resource poor/unwilling” to solve the business need of the team.
So in order to *get stuff done* they find a solution that works and get it running - if IT isn’t going to solve it then someone has to. SaaS offerings make this a whole pile easier and the solutions are usually a lot nicer than hiring in a random contractor to do something hacky that runs unloved on a non-backed-up old desktop in the corner for the next few years.
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:06 am
You both of course raise valid points: users have been bewailing IT support since Colossus, and some have initiated independent solutions. It’s the extrapolation from that to the demise of corporate IT to which I’m objecting. Necessary but not (by a long way) sufficient.
March 4th, 2008 at 5:26 am
I agree with you completely. Since CRM applications ultimately fail because users aren’t using the systems, (See my research on “The CRM Dilemma.”)Internal IT departments will actually grow in demand because in this age of information, expertise is required to deliver industry and company-specific information to users. My research has shown that users will employ ANY excuse available to not use CRM. Lack of internal support is too good an excuse to pass up.
March 5th, 2008 at 10:39 am
It’s unfortunate that many of us feel the need to free ourselves from the shackles of our IT departments.
While Salesforce and other SaaS may not entirely remove the need for some type of support (internal or other) I think that internal IT teams need to wake up and begin taking on a more customer service oriented approach and tools such as Salesforce can actually assist them in doing so.
March 5th, 2008 at 10:45 am
[…] not. In a new post on the En Avant blog, Jim Donovan suggests that systems like Salesforce.com and Zoho will not be the IT department […]
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