IT Service Week

I recently saw a Question posted on LinkedIn called Where will IT be in 5-10 years?. This question was then followed by a series of questions about the future of COBOL to off-shoring IT. I’m posting my responses to IT Service Week since I feel some of the outlook would be of interest to technology managers looking to the future of IT.

What new roles will become important?
Roles that define new innovative ways of achieving business results in creating sales revenue and cost savings in labor. Roles that align technology with business.

What roles will fade away?
Anything that can be automated will be automated. Roles such as setting up accounts, troubleshooting simple issues, and manual process roles will be either eliminated or fading away. Individuals in these roles will be re-allocated to roles that manage this automation or improve the automation. What once took a team of 9 to complete will now take 1 person to manage.

Will COBOL still be here?
Yes… Legacy systems take many years to move off of… but technology managers should not focus on the technology used but the return on investment of that technology. If a system built in COBOL is still delivering a return higher than the cost of not developing a new system then why should they get rid of COBOL?

Will Project Management be the same?
I think a higher responsibility will be placed on Project Managers to not only deliver projects on time and within budget but they will also have to start showing the value of their projects to VPs and the Executives making budget decisions.

What will methods, software, hardware lookk like?
Hardware that is cheaper than PB sandwiches and Software that is more expensive than caviar…. We will eventually move off of a software based system and more of a service oriented architecture. Ironic…. but Citrix Services and Windows Terminal Services was ahead of its time. The cost reduction of NOT having to deploy installed services to individual desktops will be a great reduction in cost. As bandwidth and disk space becomes cheaper and security concerns increase…. it may benefit some organizations to move their infrastructure to a terminal services based solution in some areas (i.e. help desk, support roles, admin roles, etc)

Will Americans carve out a niche or will all IT be offshored?
Certain tasks such as monitoring systems and maintaining databases could be off shored, but roles that require customer service or knowledge of American business operations will be very costly to offshore.

What positive observations/predictions do you have to share?

We are increasingly looking for new ways to standardize systems and processes. This is quite different than back in previous decades where everyone wanted to build their own system and their own “better” way of doing things…. now everyone wants to build interoperability between technologies. To get ahead in technology in the coming decades will mean that your organization is an information contributor and not one to suppress information.

Tomorrow (March 18, 2008) AJAXWorld kicks off in New York. The conference will feature 80+ technical sessions, Keynotes, Power Panels and General Session Demos on the Rich Internet Technology and how to build front-end applications for users. What does it mean for IT Services? AJAX, Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, has really had a few years to mature since Jesse James Garrett made it popular back in 2005. Now, more than ever, enterprises are taking advantage of building AJAX applications to meet business critical situations.

An interesting technical session that will be available at AJAXWorld this year is Mission Critical AJAX: Making Test Ordering Easier and Faster at Quest Diagnostics by David Rapperport and Rob Tweed. The session will detail how Quest Diagnostics needed to create a mission critical service catalog for it’s lab techs to order new lab equipment and diagnostic supplies. Quest used the technology of AJAX to build a custom internal interface that would be reliable, stable, and achieve it’s mission critical service levels.

Not only Service Catalogs can take advantage of AJAX for IT Service Management applications. IT Service Desk applications such as HP Service Manager takes advantage of the web tier delivering a Change Management Calendar and Employee Self Service (ESS) Tier for an enterprise’s end-users to quickly get help when they do not want to wait on the phone for a Help Desk Analyst. LiveTime Service Manager, a Service Desk product for Small to Medium Businesses, is built completely out of Web 2.0 and AJAX technologies. Every year Pink Elephant gives out an Innovation of the Year award to the most innovative idea in ITIL. Maybe this is the year that someone integrates ITIL Strategies that effectively utilize the iPhone? I recently downloaded my copy of the SDK to start on a few little side projects. Imagine what the world would be like if your Desktop Engineers didn’t have to walk back to their desk to update an Incident Ticket? What if they could do it straight from their iPhone? Now that’s what I call Service!

The need to understand how your organization’s business works are the keys to your success. This statement would hold valid truths from the administrative assistant up to the CIO. Everyone in the IT organization MUST understand what it’s role in the business environment in order for that organization to be effectively implementing IT across the enterprise. I recently came across a slide show on CIOInsight that discusses the Top 10 Management Concerns of CIOs. In this report they interviewed CIOs from 112 different companies to find out what most CIOs are concerned about in the coming year. The top three rounded out at Recruitment being first, Aligning Business with IT as second, and Building Business Skills as the third most important concern for CIOs. This means that companies are facing an enormous demand for IT talented professionals that not only understand the nuts and bolts of IT Services but also how IT Services can provide value to the Business.

1. Understand Your Industry
Understanding the industry of your business is crucial to understanding how an IT department can provide services to it’s business users. Subscribe to trade journals, read competitors websites, download how-to articles, and make certain you have read the wikipedia article relating to your industry at least twice. A great source for anything about everything is About.com. About features micro sites about particular topics with real people with subject knowledge in the various category. From understanding Supply Chain Management to the latest widget you can build with PHP is available on About. Trade journals are great also. I subscribe to a number of them to really understand how each industry is using technology in their own worlds. A couple I would recommend would be GovTech, for government related industries, and QSR Magazine for the Quick Service Restaurant Industry. Yahoo has a great directory to help you out if you are uncertain which trade magazines fit your industry.

2. Develop Business Skills Developing those functional business skills taught in college to Business Majors make you much more effective in your delivery of IT Services. Think of how many project decisions are won and lost based on a technical presentation of data? How many promotions are given based on the word smith of a performance review? How much publicity can you drive for your project across lines of business? Developing the skills of negotiation, presentation, and business writing will most certainly help your campaign. If you don’t have those skills try enrolling into an MBA program at a University or taking a course at a local community college. Toastmasters International is also a GREAT way to build your presentation skillset. No one will force you to take these courses, you will have to put in the effort on your own.

3. Take on projects that allow you to interact with Non-IT users When we deal with people that speak the same IT jargon as we do we tend to lose track of reality. Every chance you get to present a technology topic to someone non-IT is another step to developing great business savy skills. A number of times it helps to completely explain your mission to a neutral party. When I took a Geography course back in my freshman year of college, the professor stated that the best way to know that YOU understand a topic is to be able to explain it to someone not in the course. The same holds true in the IT world. If you can explain how a database works with storing a restaurant’s financial data you are one step ahead of the curve. There is no real course to obtain these skills other than experience. Get on projects that allow you to interact with Accounting, HR, Marketing, and other departments. Prepare an elevator pitch about how your role on an IT project impacts your business, industry, and the world.

Understanding how your functions as an IT Professional effect the Business on a minute-by-minute basis will greatly effect your career and bring some job satisfaction. So the next time you are at the bookstore pick up a copy of the latest trade journal and get the move on. The time to align business and IT is now.

Tulsa World, a news site for news about the Oklahoma city, published an article this morning entitled Books, CDs, IT Services? in which it mentions the transformation of Amazon.com from being just an online bookstore to becoming a giant in selling Media online and now it’s newest venture of selling data services to small businesses. Amazon.com hopes to be the one-stop shop for IT Services for small business retailers. The article continues to mention a few early adopters of the new service.

I found the article to be interesting in finding that Amazon.com is trying to move into the territory of Google, Go Daddy, and Web Hosts that cater to small businesses. The services they offer are not new, except that now a small retailer could essentially house everything in one place. With Amazon hosting data in addition to creating store fronts for small businesses, this could lead to a new wave of purchasing software, media, and ebooks over the web. We’ve seen a few companies attempt to venture into the electronic procurement industry by providing consumers with immediate downloads of Games, E-books, and Media. To date the only successful player has been iTunes. Could Amazon and it’s mighty marketing arm with millions of visitors to it’s pages create the first online storefront to deliver a copy of MS Office over the web? Would this be the end of buying software in local computer retail shops like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc?

Quite frankly, I’ve excited. Anytime that I can get a Service or piece of Software immediately following the purchase I’m overjoyed. For most people, they don’t forecast their need of a piece of software. Sometimes they are working on a project at 1am and realize that Photoshop might be a better way to modify that image or they need a copy of Powerpoint to finish that presentation by 8am the next morning. Well, in the case of Amazon.com, they are giving the retailers a mechanism to develop an on-demand storefront so we’ll have to just stay tuned for the retailers to make use of the technology.