IT departments may have a tough time of it in the coming years but don't expect to see them completely disappear, says Bill Grubbs, COO for IT recruitment giant the Spring Group. "I've been in the industry for 22 years," he says. "When fourth-generation languages (4GLs) first came out, they said that the end users would be programming their own applications and the development departments would go away. Of course, that never happened."
Nevertheless, there are parallels with the manufacturing sector, where lower skilled jobs are being outsourced to other countries, he says, adding that the IT department will follow the same trend. "But we are some way from that happening wholesale," he says.
The consensus is that the IT department will not disappear but is likely to change dramatically. John Roguszczak, a director at outsourcing planning consultancy Orbys, argues that while the IT department is not in immediate danger, individuals could be unless they change their skill sets. "The future role of the IT department is one that learns how to engage with the business more and is prepared to be outward looking, rather than focused internally on day-to-day operations," he warns. Consequently, the people that produce the software solutions such as Java and C++ programmers are more likely to end up working for third-party service providers, he says. So, what does that leave in-house? Tim Murfet, head of technical consulting at Accenture, says that IT departments will draw a line between development and more tactical or strategic elements such as defining business specifications, change control, programme management and acceptance testing.
"Some people are still keeping that raw development and coding at the bottom of the stack but because they have drawn the line, they can choose to do some in-house and some offshore," he says. "The management of the in-house project is exactly the same as the management of the external project." The caveat is that projects with clearly defined boundaries are often easier to outsource.
But the people at the top of the stack, dealing with project management and long-term planning, are the safest in the IT department, because it goes against most people's principles to outsource their expertise. Such people will be necessary to manage the relationships with outsourced providers and to plan long-term IT direction while talking closely with business departments to understand their needs, explains Orbys' Roguszczak.
But this idea of bringing the IT department and the business departments closer together has been a recurrent discussion for decades. Surely businesses have solved this problem already?
"..the people at the top of the stack, dealing with project management and long-term planning, are the safest in the IT department, because it goes against most people's principles to outsource their expertise."
Experts? Bah! I have met a fair number of IT project managers who know practically nothing about what they are supposed to be managing beyond the name of their project, and rely on the ever-dwindling undercl**** of technicians to feed them with information and do the work that they (the PM's)reap praises from management for. Even PM's and Planners who know something about their projects often have knowledge that is incomplete or taken from some ancient procedural document (which don't always accurately reflect reality), and many don't bother to find out the whole story before fobbing the work off to the poor tech who has to cobble together a working solution from the vacuous, semi-literate ramblings supplied.
Project "Managers" really should be called project secretaries or project co-ordinators, as the word "Manager" tends to give them (and real management) an overblown sense of importance way out of proportion to their significance (this translates directly to their expectation of an inflated pay packet and an apparent belief that the title 'manager' has magically conferred an additional 50 points to their IQ). Instead of sacking your technicians, who actually know how to make things run, culling the paper-and-email-shuffling parasite cl**** is where senior management can reap huge cost savings.
Remember Ansett? They sacked one technician too many, and although the company no doubt had legions of Project Managers & so-called "Experts", at the end of the day these uebermensch were as effective as lead weights when it came to getting underserviced & thus potentially unsafe Ansett aeroplanes back in the air.
While a body needs some fat to keep warm, excess layers of fat (middle & project managers) building up eventually results in a heart attack. The irony is that the people in charge of slimming the payroll are often loath to start culling their own kind.. Good heavens, if you retrench people on the basis that they don't know or do much of value, where will it all end?
The shortsightedness and stupidity that is rampant these days in bloated corporations would not be a sensible business model if translated into a small or medium business: indeed, it would probably put a small or medium sized business OUT of business.
So (getting back to the quote above) condider carefully where your company's TRUE expertise lies, before you outsource it or retrench it, and lose it forever.