The PDA Guerrilla: What are you going to do after IT?

All of us in the IT industry have taken it as a matter of faith that our jobs are basically secure, that opportunity will forever be knocking, and that we have little to worry about in our careers. In recent years that has become less so than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, but it still is a matter of faith for most of us.

Well I hate to pop the bubble, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Actually there is a clear trend, and it points to a future, not far away now, when IT will cease to appear on most corporate org charts at all, when in fact IT services will be delivered like electricity, from a plug (the network plug) in the wall.

I am hardly the first person to realize that. Actually I first read about the concept of IT as a utility years ago, but at that time it seemed to be science fiction, like a Mars colony – something that undoubtedly will happen someday but probably not in my lifetime. Well, the Mars colony is still probably decades away, but computing as a utility is here today, and it is called Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). And in just a few years it will mean the end of almost all IT shops and all that goes with them – consultants, analysts, conferences, and our golden career paths.

The trend really began in the mid-1980s when mainframe jobs started disappearing. I have a good friend from college who was a top Fortran programmer on Wall Street, and then quite suddenly, literally in a day, his career ended. He ended up moving to Florida and becoming a real estate appraiser.

Then client/server started, and standardized software interfaces developed, making integration of different programs much easier. At about the same time fourth generation languages appeared, simplifying programming, and off-the-shelf enterprise-level software like SAP made custom programming unnecessary for many shops. Today only a few large corporations have their own custom programming groups.

The next big step was the Internet boom, which resulted in the laying of huge amounts of fiber worldwide, and particularly between continents. That really empowered offshore outsourcing. Suddenly you could put your IT shop anywhere and provide computing to any location on the network. Huge numbers of jobs migrated to India. But you still needed some IT at home to monitor the service levels and to handle things that couldn't be moved overseas for one reason or another.

Today SaaS eliminates even that. And it makes computing as a utility cheap enough that many medium-sized, high-growth companies in particular are jumping on that bandwagon. These companies will never have an IT shop above the desktop support level, and they may outsource even that. SaaS delivers business services from a centralized location on an on-demand basis, just like electricity. Does anyone in your organization measure the quality of the electricity being delivered to your office? Does your company, in fact, have anyone on staff who is an expert in electricity?

Anyone who doubts the impact of SaaS on the market need only look at the brief history of CRM. This was the next big thing in business computing in the 1990s, requiring big-box software running on a server in the data center, and Siebel was its king. And then Salesforce.com arrived and everything changed. Today huge numbers of companies get their CRM out of a plug in the wall and don't care where it is running, or on what, or who is optimizing it or updating, or anything about it. All they care about is that the functionality they need is delivered to their sales people wherever they may be 24x7 at a fraction of the cost of providing the same service in-house. And that lower cost equals competitive advantage, which means that their competitors had better get with Salesforce.com right now or watch their markets shrink.

And the SaaS companies are becoming more sophisticated. The original SaaS offerings were “plain vanilla” versions. Now they are easily customizable to individual organizations. And the latest trend is for the service providers to partner and, among other things, integrate their offerings to the point that users aren't even conscious of which service is doing what. That's right, the vendors are doing the integrating, so their customers don't have to. That means that all those systems integrators out there are facing the end to their careers.

SaaS is still in its infancy, with many of the vendors still struggling to develop a viable business strategy and reach an audience. But Salesforce.com has shown us what is about to happen. In a decade most organizations of all sizes will no longer have an IT department. The only computers they will have on premise will be laptops carried by their users, and even those (Vista notwithstanding) will become so automated and self-regulating that desktop support will be virtually a thing of the past.

So ask yourself, very seriously, what are you going to be doing a decade from now. And start making plans to get yourself there. Because the choices are get a job with an SaaS vendor, develop very specialized knowledge to fit one of the few niche areas that will remain of traditional IT, retire, or find a job somewhere else. And for most of us, myself included I am sure, the last two will be our only options.

For information on the fast growth of the SaaS industry and on specific SaaS providers, check with my friends at Saugatuck Technology at www.saugatech.com.