The End of Corporate IT

I have seen the future and there is no IT. Oh, there will be people called IT personnel and there will be external IT corporations, but the corporate IT operations and development departments as we know them today, will cease to exist…and soon. A few wise souls may realize that the end is out there in some amorphous distant future, but in the meantime they slog away at the daily minutiae, oblivious to the quickly approaching cliff off of which they are about to plummet. I predict it will happen suddenly and within the next few years.

There are a number of factors leading to this inevitable demise of corporate IT, but three in particular will be sufficient to bring on the end:

•             The corporate acceptance of SaaS.

•             The explosion of consumer technology.

•             The US economy.

Software as a Service, or SaaS, is software made available through the web for which corporations or individuals contract with an outside provider. The benefits of this are ease of use, ubiquitous access, continual maintenance and backup, and single, budget-able cost of “ownership”. Most of the concerns against using SaaS can be summed up as Security Fears. Many companies are not ready to put their proprietary data up in the cloud for fear that others will be able to access it. Most SaaS data is fully encrypted and unavailable to anyone other than the contracted company. Encryption schemes are only getting stronger and the security argument will largely fade within a few years. I believe SaaS is now where online banking was in 1995. A few people were starting to do it, but it was not widely adopted due to security fears. Eventually, the cost of not doing it will greatly outweigh the security concerns. Today online banking is a necessity because the cost of not doing it is significantly greater than the risk. This is true to the point that even after a major financial security breach occurs, corporations and consumers might change their methods, but they would never consider discontinuing their usage of online banking altogether.

Consumer technology and services have exploded in recent years. With the development of powerful smart phones and the ubiquity of network access, consumers are now connected to the internet all the time, in a way that they used to be connected only at work. This has given rise to all kinds of tools and services designed for consumers to make their lives easier. Social networking, knowledge transfer, contact management, document management, storage, and backup, are all services that corporations provide to their employees at work, but that employees use for themselves at home without the need of an IT department. Consumer services provide all of these services faster, better and cheaper than corporate IT, meanwhile, corporate IT stands in the way of employees adopting consumer technologies in the enterprise, ostensibly to protect the corporation, but the perception is quickly emerging, that we’re actually protecting ourselves. We are becoming obstructionists, preventing people from using the tools that they are familiar with, and forcing them to use outdated tools that we can control. Furthermore, as the older generation of employees retire, the younger employees will require less assistance with technology, and will insist on using the newer technologies that they already use for their personal information management.

The two factors above will continue apace and eventually lead to the downfall of corporate IT on their own, however, they are being helped along by an increasingly poor US economy, in which corporations are cutting back on every conceivable extraneous expense. Many SaaS providers are currently perceived to be more expensive than their internally hosted counterparts. However, that is only because IT personnel and internal infrastructure are still considered requirements. If you remove those requirements, suddenly SaaS is a bargain. As prices of SaaS come down, this will only become more apparent. Economic pressures also come to bear on the enterprise adoption of consumer technologies. Consumer services like social networking (LinkedIn) are free to use and provide much greater functionality than many similar internal services like contact and relationship management applications (InterAction).