If you want something done right...
My friend Professor Joplin would say that we are in an era of evolutionary flux, both biologically and culturally. My use of this statement will no doubt bring her to attack the context of my usage of it in this blog (and I certainly hope she uses this forum to do so), but her paradigm illustrates the world in general...I seek its usage as an explanation of why the IT industry today is also in a flux of a similar nature.
At the end of the previous century, with the emotional world in a state of hesitant dread of what the zeroes would do to our collective psyche, the IT industry was doubled over with a certain two-digit doom that most companies knew about when they coded it ten to twenty years earlier and yet waited until the last moment before even admitting it was an issue -- let alone actually taking hard-fought budget dollars to correct it. I speak, of course, of the Y2K debacle. At the time, I was working with a couple of Fortune 500 corporations in their effort to slay this proverbial dragon before he breathed fire on January 1st, 2000, and what should have been an easy walk in the allegorical park turned into a dark, revealing nightmare of hardware and software replacement that far outstripped their budgeted IT dollars. But the day came and went without the world ending, and computers went on to keep printing social security and accounts payable checks. Life went on.
Into the void left by this sudden collective exhalation went the Dot.com investment bubble that popped shortly thereafter when the IT dollars that had been under-budgeted failed to reappear. In a lot of analysts' minds, it never will be as "fluid" of an IT budget as it was for Y2K...and I tend to agree. There will never again be the sort of protracted effort and funding that was the Apollo Program, either -- but that didn't stop the space effort. Just changed it into fetching gorgeous images from the surface of Titan and Mars rovers who are working a year past their supposed "mean time to fail" that are proving the world once had flowing water. A similar evolutionary change (hence my borrowing of the good doctor's phrase) in IT is happening now. And it is tending to be more of the result of the old adage, "if you want something done right, do it yourself".
Now, since our company specializes in consulting and training, one might think such a change means our death. Quite the contrary. Instead, it means companies will want to bring full IT facilities in-house to avoid repetitive costs, and therefore must turn to facilitators like us to teach them how to do so, or consult with us on the ways and means. In fact, this approach is a sound one financially for the company, since its result is that you have more control over how quickly "bleeding edge" technologies are adopted -- or if they are even looked at -- and how essential the migrations to newer methodologies are. Cost effective notions, as well as proper planning that can easily fit into budget forecasting.
So if you are a business or an individual that hears the constant barrage of "bigger, better, faster, more" from vendors or the IT community as a whole, think twice. You have control of the IT evolution that represents your niche. It doesn't mean you will reach "extinction" because you aren't keeping up...it means your evolution will be a gradual and longer lasting adoption of the critical IT elements and technologies, since you ARE managing them. And the role of the consultant or trainer is one of assisting that evolution...not hastening it towards the realm of the dodo.
At the end of the previous century, with the emotional world in a state of hesitant dread of what the zeroes would do to our collective psyche, the IT industry was doubled over with a certain two-digit doom that most companies knew about when they coded it ten to twenty years earlier and yet waited until the last moment before even admitting it was an issue -- let alone actually taking hard-fought budget dollars to correct it. I speak, of course, of the Y2K debacle. At the time, I was working with a couple of Fortune 500 corporations in their effort to slay this proverbial dragon before he breathed fire on January 1st, 2000, and what should have been an easy walk in the allegorical park turned into a dark, revealing nightmare of hardware and software replacement that far outstripped their budgeted IT dollars. But the day came and went without the world ending, and computers went on to keep printing social security and accounts payable checks. Life went on.
Into the void left by this sudden collective exhalation went the Dot.com investment bubble that popped shortly thereafter when the IT dollars that had been under-budgeted failed to reappear. In a lot of analysts' minds, it never will be as "fluid" of an IT budget as it was for Y2K...and I tend to agree. There will never again be the sort of protracted effort and funding that was the Apollo Program, either -- but that didn't stop the space effort. Just changed it into fetching gorgeous images from the surface of Titan and Mars rovers who are working a year past their supposed "mean time to fail" that are proving the world once had flowing water. A similar evolutionary change (hence my borrowing of the good doctor's phrase) in IT is happening now. And it is tending to be more of the result of the old adage, "if you want something done right, do it yourself".
Now, since our company specializes in consulting and training, one might think such a change means our death. Quite the contrary. Instead, it means companies will want to bring full IT facilities in-house to avoid repetitive costs, and therefore must turn to facilitators like us to teach them how to do so, or consult with us on the ways and means. In fact, this approach is a sound one financially for the company, since its result is that you have more control over how quickly "bleeding edge" technologies are adopted -- or if they are even looked at -- and how essential the migrations to newer methodologies are. Cost effective notions, as well as proper planning that can easily fit into budget forecasting.
So if you are a business or an individual that hears the constant barrage of "bigger, better, faster, more" from vendors or the IT community as a whole, think twice. You have control of the IT evolution that represents your niche. It doesn't mean you will reach "extinction" because you aren't keeping up...it means your evolution will be a gradual and longer lasting adoption of the critical IT elements and technologies, since you ARE managing them. And the role of the consultant or trainer is one of assisting that evolution...not hastening it towards the realm of the dodo.
posted by Mark Underwood at
3:33 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home