>What do the panel think? Are you happy doing the gluing, until your job is no longer there or do you become a manufacturer of the parts?
I think a better thing to consider is the "model" that companies will adopt over the next decade and how that will alter the IT jobs available and the skills required.
The first IT model was : "Do everything in house. Write our own systems. Employee Programmers"
Then came : "Do everything in house, but use contractors & consultancys because we don't want to have and don't have a career path for programmers"
The next was the "Bobification" of the development. Or "Give it to someone else".
Offshoring to low-cost countries has largely failed and certainly not delivered the expected returns for all the reasons that have been discussed adfinitum on this forum. Namely : lack of skills, cultural barriers, lack of risk taking and initiative, narrowing of costs between Western and lower-cost development centres.
But also I believe it has failed because of the "Linear" business model of the likes of Wipro, Infosys, Tata, Indenture. They need to employ as many people ( or "resources" or FTE as humans are quaintly know as in HR ) as possible. This is how they make money - by having as many chargeable people as possible, working as slowly as possible, for as long as possible.
So the obvious penny is now dropping in IT departments across the West as they finally realise that the contracts they have signed up for are delivering less and costing more. IT departments are everywhere are waking up to the fact that they are perceived as blockers rather than enablers of businesses. They are struggling to figure out how they can remain ( or even, if they should ) relevant in an IT world where people Bring Their Own Devices to work, are comfortable using Dropbox and googlemail and where the marketing department can sign up to Office365 and SalesForce.Com and have 95% of their IT requirements met.
So what will come next? Well for one it will not be a return to doing everything in house. Those days are long gone and anyway weren't perfect in the first place.
I think that the next model is going to be whole-scale adoption of "cloud services" ( i hate that term ) . We all know that "Cloud" is just a tag and doesn't describe anything new that hasn't been done for at least 15 years but by "cloud" I mean the complete contracting of a service for some particular function.
Using SAP as an example it would mean having one single organisation implement, host, support, upgrade, patch and do the project work for the system.
In other words distribute work vertically to organisations rather than horizontally as is currently the case.
So what are the skills required in this brave new world? Data management ( certainly ), Security ( definitely ), evangalism ( the promotion of certain platforms and tools ), programming ..... still required for integrating between services and also for building what the market wont provide.
I think a better thing to consider is the "model" that companies will adopt over the next decade and how that will alter the IT jobs available and the skills required.
The first IT model was : "Do everything in house. Write our own systems. Employee Programmers"
Then came : "Do everything in house, but use contractors & consultancys because we don't want to have and don't have a career path for programmers"
The next was the "Bobification" of the development. Or "Give it to someone else".
Offshoring to low-cost countries has largely failed and certainly not delivered the expected returns for all the reasons that have been discussed adfinitum on this forum. Namely : lack of skills, cultural barriers, lack of risk taking and initiative, narrowing of costs between Western and lower-cost development centres.
But also I believe it has failed because of the "Linear" business model of the likes of Wipro, Infosys, Tata, Indenture. They need to employ as many people ( or "resources" or FTE as humans are quaintly know as in HR ) as possible. This is how they make money - by having as many chargeable people as possible, working as slowly as possible, for as long as possible.
So the obvious penny is now dropping in IT departments across the West as they finally realise that the contracts they have signed up for are delivering less and costing more. IT departments are everywhere are waking up to the fact that they are perceived as blockers rather than enablers of businesses. They are struggling to figure out how they can remain ( or even, if they should ) relevant in an IT world where people Bring Their Own Devices to work, are comfortable using Dropbox and googlemail and where the marketing department can sign up to Office365 and SalesForce.Com and have 95% of their IT requirements met.
So what will come next? Well for one it will not be a return to doing everything in house. Those days are long gone and anyway weren't perfect in the first place.
I think that the next model is going to be whole-scale adoption of "cloud services" ( i hate that term ) . We all know that "Cloud" is just a tag and doesn't describe anything new that hasn't been done for at least 15 years but by "cloud" I mean the complete contracting of a service for some particular function.
Using SAP as an example it would mean having one single organisation implement, host, support, upgrade, patch and do the project work for the system.
In other words distribute work vertically to organisations rather than horizontally as is currently the case.
So what are the skills required in this brave new world? Data management ( certainly ), Security ( definitely ), evangalism ( the promotion of certain platforms and tools ), programming ..... still required for integrating between services and also for building what the market wont provide.
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