Are People the Answer? Not Necessarily…

March 17, 2008

Happy St. Patty’s Day. We owe much of our country’s early infrastructure development to the large group of Irish immigrants that came over in the 1800’s. Masses of capable workers were the solution to getting the canals, railroads, and roads built in this country over a century ago. My wife’s family is Irish. She’s the 6th of 10 kids and has quite a nice family. In the 1800’s “people” were the answer to most economic growth initiatives. Nowadays, I’m not so sure that’s still the answer.
In a March 4th article in the Dayton Business Journal (Dayton, Ohio….the one team that should have made it into the NCAA March Madness and didn’t) there’s an article that quotes Robert Half, the Menlo Park, California-based IT Staffing firm, that shows Ohio has a robust hiring plan in IT for 2008. By polling CIO’s at Ohio-based Headquarters of large firms, they see a “fertile job market” where 10% of them are predicting adding staff in Cincinnati while 4% are predicting staff reductions. There’s other cities mentioned as well that show an increase in hiring people into IT. I have a problem with the very concept the article was written on. It’s really a “nothing article” since IT isn’t about “how many people are in your organization” but rather how are you increasing productivity of your end users, your vendors, your clients! We are in a race to add more computing power unleashing the power of DATA. Everyone defaults their focus on IT meaning Technology and thus, Technology is taken care of by PEOPLE. Then we talk about “how many people are in your organization?” as if one has an army of talent to lead into battle in the world economy…not so, from my viewpoint. The article didn’t say what the other 86% of the CIO’s are doing in the Cincinnati market??? The stronger companies are focusing on creating collaborative environments where the power of INFORMATION and not TECHNOLOGY is the key to their value proposition.Nick Carr in his recent book The Big Switch is espousing that the IT world is going to change significantly one more time. This metamorphosis is going to close down separate Data Centers just like the industrial revolution 100 years ago reallocated individual power generation dynamo’s into a centralized power generation model shared through the electric grid. In their case, the grid had to be built after the centralized power generation facilities went up. In our case, the grid is the Internet and all of that fiber that started to be laid 10 years ago and is now providing huge bandwidth. Centralized data centers needed centralized people to run the physical aspects of them. Frankly, the logical attributes are virtualized just in the same manner the centralized data centers’ hardware and processing infrastructure are being virtualized. Everything from developing logical architecture (SOA), application requirements, application development and testing, and even managing all of the databases once in production can be done “anywhere, anytime, by anyone.” People are certainly needed and yet, processes are even more important. For maximum productivity, the people shouldn’t be in Ohio. Let’s be frank. The people should be where the processes are most mature and their costs become the lowest common denominator (read: Asia although our falling dollar may make other places and even the US more competitive). By providing computing power “just in time” with managed services on a “just in time” basis as well, there isn’t much of a need for an IT organization. Perhaps we rename IT the “Processes and Measures Services Organization.” Even the word “Information” is not needed since Information is an assumed need every time!
Ironically, Robert Half does have a division called Provititi whose main services offerings are centered around “Processes and Measures!!!” Now that’s cool! So, next time, I hope the Dayton Business Journal writes a story about Productivity Improvement measures for the Ohio-based companies! (I would be happy to serve as a source.)

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