Phil Windley, former CIO of the state of Utah, has written a very interesting piece on his IT hierarchy of needs and the current outsourcing trend. Windley notes that much of the outsourcing is being done among the "coal-mining" type IT jobs--maintaining the low level infrastructures.
My prediction is that while hundreds of thousands of IT jobs will go off-shore in the next decade, we'll gain more than we lose as we move up the hierarchy. We do a poor job of meeting demands at the top of the hierarchy and there's plenty of work to do. When you think about the real problems that IT should be solving, its amazing how little attention we pay to them. Our goal ought to be to provide every employee with the information they need to do their job when they need it. Instead, we throw an email client and a word processor at them and say "good luck." We can do better and the first step is to embrace the changes that are required to solve the problems at the bottom of the hierarchy---even if that means some pain in the short term.
The real problem is that most CIOs focus on IT rather than IM. The focus is on the technology rather than the people and the information they need.
Posted by Karl
December 23, 2003 02:53 PM