The consequences of the economic earthquake are now coming into sharp focus. Two clear trends from recent surveys and analyst reports (Networkworld Article here) agree that we are about to experience:
2. LOB IT independence
Both of the above are likely to become apparent across businesses great and small.
Budget Stretch
It is most likely that budget in IT departments will be frozen or even trimmed over the next couple of years. This will force IT management to look at existing deployments to see where efficiencies can be made. These could come from areas such as self service, outsourcing, cessation of redundant or rarely IT used services or application / server consolidation - however these savings will need to be made with little or no 'free cash' as there is none of this around.
Of course headcount will be under threat in countries where losing people can be achieved at low cost but I suspect natural wastage will mean open positions will simply not be filled.
LOB IT Independence
Line of Business will still need to innovate and respond quickly to business challenges but faced with an over-stretched IT department the logical approach will be to engage in direct purchasing of SaaS solutions. The power of the cloud has the capability to directly fulfil emerging business needs.
Of course this will have a beneficial side effect as these departments who have often cried out for highly customised solutions find themselves constrained to applications that can be configured but not re-written.
With a bit of luck this 'straight jacket' will enable IT to deploy more vanilla solutions when internal investment picks up again.
Comments (1)
Achieving and sustaining our future relevance in this turbulent context will need a radical new approach to the way we deliver value to our enterprise stakeholders.
So the future will not be about the emasculation of IT but about the post-IT paradigm.
Every cloud [sic] has a silver lining but the platinum lining of the downturn tempest may well be the motivation to start doing things differently.
Just because we currently have a widespread historical affiliation to the term IT, doesn't mean IT will continue to be relevant forever.
I have written more about these opportunities, check out my blog (Fighting the Trillion Dollar Bonfire) for more details.
It's time we made IT history!
Posted by Colin Beveridge | October 23, 2008 10:52 AM
Posted on October 23, 2008 10:52