“Based on what you just told us, I’m concerned that we may not have job security in the future.  Will we have jobs?”

It was a fair question, and one I knew would come up.  The reality is that with any significant change in a marketplace, there is concern about job losses.  In the case of our industry, that concern is legitimate.

If you believe Nicholas Carr’s predictions about the IT industry, you expect the entire IT “middle class” to be turned into dinosaurs over the next handful of years.  I happen to think he’s right.

But that doesn’t mean that jobs at an individual company will be wiped out.  In fact, I think employees at our company will much more job security if we make the transition to our next strategy successfully.  And most of those jobs will be more highly paid.

But they will be different.

And that’s the rub.  Our company and our employees must develop new skills and knowledge if they are to make this transition successfully.  As I candidly told them in our meeting, not everyone will make it.

The question for the readers of this blog is “Will you have jobs?”.

Will you be able to make the transitions necessary to survive?

Are you committed to learning new skills?

Are you committed to acquiring new knowledge?

MRC

I couldn’t agree more with Larry and Nicholas Carr, the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google and Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage.

IT is definitely going the way of the utility model, and it is happening faster than we think.  In my opinion, there will be three types of entities that play a role in this model in the future:

• The large utility IT providers
• Service “aggregators” that package and integrate various service offerings on behalf of the client
• Local physical infrastructure specialists to make sure connectivity and hardware components are working properly

Today’s managed service provider has the opportunity to be an aggregator or the local phsyical infrastructure specialist, bu the business will be very different from what we know today?

Do you have a plan to learn and adapt?  If not, you might want to sell your business while the opportunity is ripe!

MRC

Grid Computing, the utility model that might just put us out of business.

We all have heard that only taxes and death are for certain. I would like to add the newest entry, the end of PC’s and . . .

If you want to read about the end of Microsoft, and for that matter, LMS, as we operate today, read “The Big Switch” by Nicholas Carr, the author of the most controversial book “Does IT Matter?”.

In one short read you will find out where all the wealth of our nation has gone, and will continue to go, where Microsoft and any of the thousands of companies that support present day computing will go, and where hundreds of thousands of IT professionals will be going. My daily job is to make sure I don’t take the trip with them.

Scared yet? Fascinated? The story reads as follows: This nation was transformed by the introduction of electricity, but its growth was driven by the build out of utility delivered power. This allowed individual businesses to move away from trying to run their own local electric generation. Sounds familiar? Yes, Carr provides the exact analogy of all the cost, waste, and trouble of modern business trying to run their own IT infrastructure, each repeating and investing in the same ideas and equipment. Like the build out of massive power generation, Carr explains how the current development of massive computing grids will allow all businesses and individuals to tap into a national service delivery platform that will deliver your network applications in much the same way as the wall outlet in your office delivers power.

The unique blend of Google like services coupled with applications like YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and on demand delivery via the national grid will lubricate the IT machinery so that computing and its output will run effortlessly through our lives. Sophisticated applications now requiring consulting expertise and near miracles to install and get running will be delivered from the computing cloud like water at the tap.

Here is the real concern. Unlike the grid electrification that allowed industries to develop and opened new jobs as skilled labor replaced manual labor, the new technology surge is replacing old service industries with automated production that no longer require any level of human involvement. A world that is purely driven by software code. YouTube had 60 employees when bought by Google for $1.65 billion! Each employee represented $28 million in market value! Skype purchased by eBay had 200 people working for it, while it served 53 million customers on it’s free Internet phone platform! It sold for $2.1 billion! Enormous prices paid for companies that deliver services to millions, and not even 300 people employed!!! Compare that to any other existing industry today.

So as Craiglist kills off the newspaper world, Skype the phone industry, and YouTube/Flickr and the others decimate the media entertainment world, what do we plan on doing going forward. The good news is I am 54 years old, and will probably avoid the death cycle of the IT industry as we all know it today. The bad news is that everyone I love, and the next generation coming up will have to be ready for it. Yes, everyone says the world is always changing, and we will always come up with an answer, so stop causing a panic Larry. Tell that to the dinosaurs, they would have loved my “noise”

No, we don’t always survive, or at least not in the way we want to. The faster we expose the future, and what it will bring, the better chance our children will have to meet the challenge confronting them. Grid computing is the death of IT as an industry, it is the commoditizing of our “knowledge and expertise” that will be required in fractional amounts compared to today. The exact direction we need to take is unknown right now.

It is clear that beginning the process of change, and learning to build flexibility into our learning styles will be the single most important factor in ensuring our economic survival. When we all agree that immediate change is needed, it will be our job to let our schools and universities in on it. If not, we might just find this written on our country’s headstone 20 years from now.

“United States of America 1776-2027 “lived by the spirit of it’s people, died by the ignorance of it’s educational system”

Grid computing will be one of the greatest disruption technologies of the past 200 years. It will not be forgiving to those that don’t embrace it. Our nation’s future depends on the ability of our people to focus with pinpoint accuracy on knowledge and skills acquisition. Changing the way we teach, so that we change the way we learn, will ensure we never lose our position in this global economy.

Larry Shulman
President
L.M.S. Technical Services, Inc.