Where is the IT industry heading?

[BobTheCrate]

For all the fine suggestions appearing here as to the direction of IT, unfortunately IT is still headed only in two directions ...

The 1st ----> HR
and from their its continuing progress
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[sappatz]

Ai

i know a few people doing AI and.. they are indeed working for the US army who is their biggest client (and this is no joke)

[Skeptical]

Machine learning, for texts mostly. Classification, ranking, named entity extraction, etc. I also know the maths for related problems (statistics, image analysis etc) - but never had the chance to use it in a commercial environment.

[threaded]

security, nothing more needs to be said...

Totally agree. It is one of those areas where you need to be able to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

I am watching a well known consultancy ballsing up a SAP security setup at the moment. How it is possible to balls such a thing up, and in so many new and interesting ways, is keeping me quite amused at the moment.

Of course when the sh1t hits the fan I will be able to step in with an exquisitely priced set of fixes.

[sasguru]

I hope you are right, since I specialise in this area If applied to the right problem, AI can create real business value. But, right now it seems there isn't much demand for AI/data mining skills.

Give it a few years ...

PS Skeptical, what sort of AI do you do?

[Francko]

[..]
And Francko, it's like every part of the industry these days, there are the good ones and the bad ones.

It's more like every booming sector. Back before 2000, I used to work with a presumed Java expert that was earning over 100k in a permie job. 1-2 years later I realised that what he knew was very little. He was fooling everybody into as they were few people capable of noticing that. That is not the case anymore for java programmers. But it can quite easily be the case for security consultants now.

[Skeptical]

After a lot of thought I've concluded the place to be is at the intersection of AI/Statistics/Data Mining. There's a lot still to be learnt about how to make sense of the large volumes and types of data sitting in the enterprise.
AI techniques have been heavily used in the US military industry but not really outside of that.

There's gold in them thar hills, I tell yer!

I hope you are right, since I specialise in this area If applied to the right problem, AI can create real business value. But, right now it seems there isn't much demand for AI/data mining skills.

[sasguru]

A lot of this is driven (Post 9/11) by the Patriot Act, Sarbanes Oxley, Basel 2 etc etc. The anti-terrorism bodies are also very interested in any tech that draws conclusions from large volumes of data.
Unusually there are 2 successful UK-based players in this space: Searchspace and Autonomy.
Time to dust off my old AI text books I think ....

[ratewhore]

You're quite right of course but security can be a business enabler. For example, with the correct security regime in place, a business can roll out a web service solution replacing, for example, manual process, thereby reducing the bottom line.

Without the correct security in place that may not have happened. The days of security being a cost centre are, with switched on directors, going...

And Francko, it's like every part of the industry these days, there are the good ones and the bad ones.

[Francko]

security, nothing more needs to be said...

Nothing more appropriate. Most of the security consultants just know the basics (and sometimes not even those ones). Yet the salaries are obscene.

[sasguru]

True forgot about that. But that's a commodity product, what I've mentioned provides competitive advantage.

[ratewhore]

security, nothing more needs to be said...

[sasguru]

After a lot of thought I've concluded the place to be is at the intersection of AI/Statistics/Data Mining. There's a lot still to be learnt about how to make sense of the large volumes and types of data sitting in the enterprise.
AI techniques have been heavily used in the US military industry but not really outside of that.

There's gold in them thar hills, I tell yer!