Comments on: Where is Internal IT Going?

By: Jon Husband

Jon Husband — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:46:51 +0000

Dave Snowden was quite clear in his (our) podcast on knowledge work and the impact of w2.0 … more and more the work will be done with platforms and apps from “the cloud” and centralized IT will become more and more an endangered species.

By: Bill Ives

Bill Ives — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 22:48:52 +0000

Dan and Nitin – Thanks for your comments. I will look at Dan’s suggestion. The smart CIOs will include facilitating the enterprise 2.0 bits in their firms as part of forward viewing management. Bill

By: Dan Keldsen

Dan Keldsen — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 22:38:02 +0000

Commodity level (pipes, plumbing, infrastructure, guts – chose your metaphor) IT is fast evaporating into the outsourcing world (having just left an outsourcing company after 3+ years, it’s actually more interesting than you might think), and most definitely, the smarter outsourcing outfits are looking for longer, relationship/partnership-oriented models, rather than one-off, small projects.

An article at CIO Insight was just sent to me by a colleague earlier today, which would be good reading as well, on this vein: CIOs, Meet Your New Boss – and hints at the “grooming/social software” post as well.

Short story: the boring bits of IT are being driven by commodity pricing and under the finger of the CFO, whereas “innovation” is being driven by a new breed (the evolutionary survivor of business IT) of CIO, that reports into strategy/forward-viewing management. That’s the theory at least, but take a look at the article for the full details.

By: NitinK

NitinK — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:43:24 +0000

Thanks, Bill! You’ve raised some really interesting questions; as you say, these are logical extensions of this trend of providers becoming strategic partners of the Enterprise.

Although software is quite different from the automobile industry, I wonder if some of the same models could be used in this case – for example, the large OEMs, even while competing with each other, often include assemblies from the same supplier; their differentiation is at a higher level. Also, a very large percentage of any automobile comes from a hierarchical tier of suppliers, and the automakers manage to compete anyway.

In the same way, the IT department could evolve into a small set of generalist architects, who provide competitive advantage by *combining* the underlying software components (which in turn, are made up of even smaller components) into effective information systems and business processes.

This may be fanciful thinking – time will tell!