IDC says HR to help Web 2.0 adoption. Um...what?

I just read an article by INQUIRER.net writer Lawrence Casiraya that had me raising my eyebrows. He interviewed IDC's Shalini Verma about the concept of "unified communications" and how Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking can help distributed organizations collaborate more effectively.

Here's the money quote.

So how can businesses begin to embrace Web 2.0? The task may fall into the hands of the human resource department.

What was Verma thinking? HR, together with IT, have been the main forces preventing adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace. According to Verma, HR should conduct a survey to find out what technologies are already being used and then make a plan for company-wide adoption of the most useful tools.

Well, I doubt that will work. Pretend we are listening to a conversation between two 'screenagers' when they get a survey from HR...

Nancy Networker: Did you see this survey from HR? They're trying to find out what sort of web apps we use. Why do they want to know?

Wally Widgetuser: (Smirking knowingly to Nancy) The survey says it's because they want to help us collaborate more effectively across the company.

Nancy and Wally have a good, cynical laugh.

Nancy: Well, I'm not telling them anything. The last thing I need is for them to shut down Facebook. It's the only way I keep in touch with the guys in Thailand.

Wally: You got that right. If I tell them I'm building mashups to keep track of my customer information, they'd freak.

Nancy: I'm just going to say I use Google Docs. I can live without them if HR and IT shut them down.

...

OK, the situation may not be that bad, but I'd wager that, given HR's history, there won't be a lot of trust between HR and the employees.

What's the answer?

I think HR could take the lead, but they'll have to do some groundwork first to establish some trust and credibility with the rest of the organization. Executive sponsorship wouldn't hurt either. In my own case, I spent well over a year blogging under a different name, knowing I'd be shut down if HR found out. I came out of the closet when Serena's executive leadership started promoting the use of social networking.

In addition to getting very visible executive support, HR could start publishing internal case studies about how people in the company use Web 2.0 to promote collaboration. Maybe someone in HR uses pbwiki to collaborate on ideas for the company picnic. Maybe someone in PR uses Second Life to conduct press conferences. (OK, that one's off the wall.) Perhaps someone in sales uses a mashup to get information before a customer call. If HR spends some time up front promoting the use of these collaborative tools, then maybe they will be trusted.

Maybe.

But we all remember when HR shut down MySpace, told us we couldn't blog, and forbade us from giving recommendations on LinkedIn. They've got a ways to go before we trust them with the dark secret that we use OpenKapow to scrape competitive information, or that we swap musical stations with clients on Pandora.

News from the mashup trenches

I’ve neglected this blog for a while, and now it’s time to get back to it. I didn’t think changing jobs would have much of an effect on my blogging output. Wrong again, Shaw. These days I have to do my reading and blogging mostly after hours, and that does change the dynamic. What takes priority, doing laundry, weeding the garden, helping with homework, balancing the checkbook, playing fetch with the dog, splitting wood, or...writing this blog? I'm afraid lately it's been those other things, and I'm sorry.

On the bright side, I’ve been in the trenches more than I have been in the past couple of years. It’s one thing to read analyst reports, discuss findings with customers and partners, write academic papers and pontificate from on high. It’s another to jump in and actually develop mashups. It is definitely harder to view the entire industry from a trench. Especially in the context of a fixed price contract. On the other hand, I’ve become reacquainted with the reason I went into technology in the first place: I enjoy it. I’ve written more applications (Don't be fooled. Mashups are applications.) in the past couple of months than in the past two years combined.

In a departure from my standard mashup posts, I’d like to share some things I’ve learned about mashups in the past few weeks rather than commenting on mashup news or reviewing some new mashup tool. Some of my experiences have reinforced what I thought before I embarked on this change in job title. Some have made me change my thinking, and in ways that might not make my current employer happy. Sorry in advance, Serena Software, if what I have to say doesn't agree with our marketing message.

First, I’d like to talk about the idea that mashups will allow the business to deploy their own applications without having to bother IT. I never thought this would work. After all, even applications in the tail will need access to back-end systems. Even applications in the tail will need version control of some sort. Even applications in the tail will need governance, even if that governance is light-handed compared to governance used to manage more strategic applications built by IT itself. After my time in the trenches, I’m even more convinced that mashup development has, at the very least, to be a loose partnership between the business and IT.

Let me give you an example.

I built a series of mashups as a prototype for a hardware technology company who wanted to get better control of their rebate program. It was a very intense three-day engagement where we spent the entire day working with the customer to understand their business problems, and then I got to spend the nights building mashup prototypes. (I got about four hours of sleep during those entire three days. I don’t recommend it steady-state, but it was nice to know I could get back to my developer roots if I had to do so. I even had my first fully caffeinated non-diet pop in years. I drew the line at pizza, however.)

The meetings with the client were sponsored by IT, and were run by the business. They were sponsored by IT because the business didn’t know mashups from shinola, but IT did. The business didn’t have a clue that mashups could help them, but IT did. The business was frustrated at IT’s repeated attempts to solve their growing rebate program problem, and IT responded by searching for alternatives to their same old development paradigm.

IT and business worked together to help us define the requirements. IT and business together helped identify what infrastructure was already in place to support the effort. IT and business worked together to help define what parts and pieces of the proposed new ‘system’ could be managed by end users and what parts and pieces would be governed by IT. In other words, there was deep collaboration between IT and the business. And while there were definitely self-preservation undertones in IT's motives, there was also realization on both sides that the old way of doing app dev didn’t work. Everyone was on-board to try something new.

If business had tried to run this meeting without IT, mashups wouldn't even have been on the table. It would have been strictly a shadow IT project that may or may not have taken advantage of recent Web 2.0 trends. And it would have been killed as soon as it became apparent that the project required access to CRM and financial systems. If IT had tried to run the meeting without the business, then we would likely have had a great architecture, and a deep understanding of how the pieces and parts were going to work together, but we never would have understood the deep and abiding frustration felt by the business, nor the financial imperatives that required something be done about the problem soon.

Both had to work together for success. Perhaps this isn't true for all mashup projects, but I suspect it will be true for many of them, especially any that require integration with the existing IT infrastructure.

Here’s something else I learned in the past few weeks. We’ve been saying for a while that business users would start writing their own applications because they can no longer wait for IT to do things for them. The idea is that account reps, shipping clerks, marketing program specialists, etc. would write their own mashups, and we will give them the tools to do so quickly and easily. Now that I’ve been out in the world a bit and have seen what is really going on, here’s what I think: Bullshit.

Even the young 'Net Gen' men and women on the business side don’t want to write their own apps. They may be forced to do so, but they aren’t doing it by choice. That’s because these younger workers want to make progress in their chosen career. Account reps of any age want to spend their time selling, not writing apps. Business analysts want to spend their time figuring out how to beat the competition, not writing apps. Marketing program specialists want to put programs in the field, not spend time writing apps.

So while these end users may be writing apps, they are doing so reluctantly because it takes time away from their chosen careers. Mashers are the exception rather than the rule.

What I do see is a rise in shadow IT. Certainly the business can’t wait for IT to get to their applications in the tail. But the business isn’t building these apps itself. they are hiring outside help. Unlike the wholesale shadow IT trend in the 80’s however, these new shadow IT projects have to operate below the radar. They have to be inexpensive enough to be funded within a departmental budget and not cause an IT governance blip. They also have to show fast ROI so that, when the project finally gets outed, the business can justify what it’s done in a ‘ask forgiveness not permission’ model.

(Note: web widgets are the exception. I'll write more about them in a future post.)

Here’s something that may surprise you. These shadow projects may be instigated by IT as well as by the business. IT itself is getting frustrated with its own inability to react quickly to requests for applications in the tail. In fact, I worked on a project a couple of weeks ago where I designed a guerrilla SOA infrastructure for an IT department that was trying to get an internal project into production before Big IT saw what was happening. The irony of IT setting up shadow IT to subvert Big IT made the job all the more enjoyable.

The take-away for this post is that IT and business have to work together for successful mashup projects, just as they do for any development effort. (Let's all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.) However, when business does take the lead, it is likely to be in the form of a low-cost shadow IT project rather than in the form of an internal masher. I know that isn't doctrine. Perhaps my opinion will change in the future. But for now, I calls it the way I sees it.

Mashups in the financial sector aren't just for the back office

I spent last week in NYC talking about mashups to a number of customers in the financial sector. I love going to NY, and last week the weather was beautiful and all the designer dogs were out in force in Central Park. The outlook from our financial institution clients wasn’t quite so perfect, however.

Here’s the message I heard over and over again: Mashups in the financial industry were only good for the back-office, not the front-line. So while we can help make their order-to-cash process mean and lean, we can’t help them bring innovative products to their customers.

I understand the reasons. Financial institutions have to be conservative. When bankers and investment institutions stray from the straight and narrow, somebody will likely be in front of Congress right before they go to jail. S&L bailout anyone? Would you like to invest in some junk bonds? Let's depend on Enron for our retirement portfolio. Oh yes, let’s not forget subprime mortgages.

So while I understand their reluctance to adopt mashups on the front-end of their business, I think it is a mistake. I wouldn’t expose the banking systems until we get better mashup security. But financial institutions have a lot of other offerings that aren’t tied directly to their transactional back-end systems.

Why should they bother?

Financial institutions have to walk a fine line. They are in a constant struggle to balance the need for governance, the heavy load of compliance, and a cutthroat competitive landscape. And the financial sector depends heavily on technology to be competitive. And not necessarily technology within a traditional IT organization.

According to a Booz Allen Hamilton study, for every dollar spent on ‘real’ IT, most industries also spend 78 cents on ‘shadow IT.’ That is, IT funded directly by, and implemented within the business. In the financial sector I’d be willing to bet the ratio is much higher. One bank employee I talked to said that embedding IT within the business is a necessary practice just to stay competitive. When one bank innovates, the others have to be right behind. That means tight coupling between the technologists and the business so new and innovative offerings can be out the door fast.

This sounds like a perfect job for mashups.

I’m not an expert on the institutional side, but I do have a number of personal and small business accounts with a couple of handfuls of banks and investment firms. As a consumer of financial services, I’ve got a number of ideas for how they could use mashups without compromising their core banking systems.

How about a money management mashup? Most banks have money management information, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to mash information from multiple sites, mashing book sales from Amazon? Then not only could the company provide good value to their customers, they might also be able to turn their website into a profit center.

Ditto for investment information. I have accounts with several investment firms, yet when I want to do any investment research, I have to search Yahoo! finance to get the financials and Google for any relevant news. I’d use a mashup that pulled that information together into a single page.

How about a mashup that pulls together many investment strategies? Again mashing up books from Amazon and information from some of the leading personal finance strategists. How about a mashup that lets me compare and contrast a company’s performance against some of its nearest competitors? Then mash in some Google Docs to let me save my analysis so I can retrieve it later.

And on the other side of the equation, banks and investment firms should turn some of their free web content into widgets. For example, Fidelity has a DJIA chart on their home page. If this was a widget, and they modified it to show provenance, Fidelity would get free advertising whenever someone added the widget to a mashup.

I’m not buying that mashups aren’t a good fit for the financial services industry. Most of the innovation, at least on the consumer side, isn’t in the back-end transactional systems. It’s out front, providing services, information and advice to customers.

Again, a perfect job for mashups.

Smoking pot and stealing music. Some things never change.

OK, I admit I wrote that title to see if I could trick some people into reading this post. But really, I will actually compare the two. My motivation is a recent article by Linda Tucci, a writer for SearchCIO.com. It made me smile because it was about how millennials don't respect organizational, hierarchical or other boundaries. These millennials are going to cause security headaches because they don't respect IT policies and procedures either.

This is a hot news flash?

In her defense, Tucci was simply reporting on the results of a Symantec survey, first blogged by Symantec employee Samir Kapuria. But those of us who have either been interacting with these younger workers, or have children of that age who are about to enter the workforce, already know we've got an IT compliance disaster waiting to happen. I know that my own daughters have absolutely no respect for IP rights. In their minds, anything on the public web is and ought to be theirs for the taking. Lectures about the morality of downloading music and video fall on deaf ears. As do discussions about network security and malware.

These conversations reminded me of discussions I had with my parents about pot smoking when I was a teenager. My parents lectured me on the evils of marijuana, but in my peer culture at the time, nearly everyone smoked it. In fact, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University had parties every spring, called the Hash Bash , to protest pot laws. While I never had the guts to light up on the steps of the capital and get carted away in nonviolent protest, I wasn't above cutting class (I was in High School at the time) and joining in the party.

Bear with me. This isn't just a stroll down memory lane. It really is about mashups.

In my view at the time, and the view of many in my generation, pot was not only a civil right, it was symbol. Sure, flaunting the anti-pot laws was fun. But it was also morally defensible to break the laws in protest of unnecessarily restrictive rules and regulations. I believed my parent's views were not only behind the times, not just old fashioned. They were wrong, and nothing they said changed my mind.

That's the attitude I see in my children. Talking to them about network security, IP rights, privacy, and even footnoting, is like talking to a brick wall. For them, free access and use of all information is not only a civil right. Breaking IP and security rules is a form of political protest against unnecessary and restrictive rules and regulations. Here's the money quote from the article.

When asked whether they feel entitled to use whatever application or device or technology they would like, regardless of source or corporate IT policies, 69% of millennials said yes, compared with 31% of other workers. Indeed, 75% of millennials have downloaded software on their work computer for personal use, vs. 25% of other workers -- even though 85% of the organizations surveyed indicate their policies restrict that practice. Millennials also regularly store their corporate data on personal devices: 39% on personal computers, 38% on personal USB devices, 20% on personal hard drives and 16% on personal smartphones.

CIOs should be very afraid of these survey results. Especially since the same survey showed that IT and other corporate leaders believe they have good rules in place, and that everyone understands and mostly obeys them. Those who don't comply get fired.

Most of the Millennials I know aren't afraid of losing their job. They aren't going to get intimidated by getting yelled at by the boss. Organizations who try to restrict the use of personal devices, who prohibit social networking and other Web 2.0 applications, who try to legislate the use of web content, are either going to be mired in lawsuits, or are going to find that they can't hire innovative and out-of-the-box thinkers.

What's the alternative? I'd like to fall back on the agreement I've now forged with my children. I've worked for companies that blocked sites, monitored email, recorded web access and filtered out 'bad' words in IM. I didn't care for it, and I wasn't going to turn around and do the same thing in my own home. Nor could I simply ignore the problem. While I know pirating is illegal, I also believe it is wrong.

We finally came to a compromise that we worked out together. They don't completely like it, still believing I'm backwards-thinking. I don't completely like it, believing they will have ample opportunity to break the law. But because it is a negotiated agreement rather than a dictated policy, I have some hope of success.

• They are now free to download anything that is really free, not pirated free. MySpace is full of 'really free' music and video, and a lot of it is quite good.
• They can keep their MySpace accounts, but they must allow me access to their profiles. (Neither of them like Facebook. Probably because I use it.)
• They have an iTunes budget. It isn't large, but it is enough to buy a few songs now and then.
• They won't download software without my approval. I can only deny the download if the software is harboring malware, if it's content is objectionable or if it will cost too much.
• They agree not to store any pirated content on their computer.
• I've asked them not to 'borrow' pirated content from their friends. I've told them I'll throw away any media that I believe has pirated content.

So far it's either working or they are very good at making it appear to work. I won't take bets.

I think IT has to do something similar. In old paternalistic, hierarchical organizations it might be considered a sign of weakness to negotiate policy with subordinates. Our millennials are going to change that mindset. Corporate leaders will need to work with their employees rather than dictate to them, or they will face not being able to recruit or retain the quality of worker they need. So instead of a restrictive IT policy based on sanctions and Big Brother thinking, we'll probably end up with something similar to the agreement I have with my kids.

With respect to mashups, I think we'll also end up with something similar.

• If you mash content from the web, note the source.
• If you mash content from behind the firewall, make sure the content isn't sensitive.
• If you are mashing services from the web, make sure they don't have viruses, understand the costs, and try to use reputable sources.
• If you are mashing services from behind the firewall, make sure the services don't expose sensitive information.

Are these guidelines bulletproof? Of course not. There isn't an IT policy today that's bulletproof. What these guidelines do is help the masher understand what the issues are and why he/she should be concerned. These guidelines treat the masher like an adult, not like a naughty child or convicted felon that must be monitored.

Some may think this is mere kowtowing to these new bad boys entering the workforce. Further proof that the world is going to Hell in a hand basket. Me? I can't wait until these younger workers roll in and shake everyone up. Will we have chaos? Will there be security problems? Are there going to be mistakes, upheavals and disasters?

Most certainly. But there will also be progress.

(Note to horrified readers: I stopped smoking pot in High School. I didn't then, and still don't, think there is anything wrong with it. I just needed to get my act together academically. After HS I always ended up in jobs that required a security clearance. And now it just doesn't interest me.)

Can I take back what I said about BPM and mashups?

Back what seams a very long time ago, but was actually only October last year, I wrote a post suggesting that BPM was another form of business mashup. Like-minded blogger Sandy Kemsley agreed, and bemoaned the lack of mashup understanding in the BPM community.

I've kept an eye on the BPM community looking for activity around mashups. I've seen a few comments around the edges, but nothing I would call a trend.

I was confused. Presentation mashups and BPM may have little in common, although I would suggest that Tibco, with their focus on RIA composite applications, have been playing in the presentation mashup space for a while. (Others will likely disagree, and we can have a discussion.) However, once you get 'out of the map' and start considering mashups from a business or enterprise angle, the overlap becomes pronounced.

(Note: my good friend Summer Ficarrotta coined the term 'out of the map' months ago to help people understand that Google Maps mashups at the glass weren't the only mashups on the block.)

I think I fell into the trap of thinking that because two things look the same and act the same, they should be the same. (Do you remember Papa Bear in The Big Honey Hunt?) I have a recent article by TechTarget writer Rich Seeley to thank for getting my head out of my trap. Through his insights about BPM and SOA roles and responsibilities, I now understand just how different BPM and mashups are.

In his article about the business and IT roles within SOA and BPM, he lists eight different roles involved in creating a BPM/SOA application, four each in business and IT.

Business Roles

• Business Leader: Responsible for overall business performance, compliance and governance.
• Business Professional: Manages business performance and decides on strategic and tactical needs for a specific area of responsibility.
• Business Analyst: Interprets business professional and business leader requests and documents them into process models.
• Process Analyst: Specialized business analyst who concentrates on the simulation and analysis of processes in their business environments and their interactions.

IT Roles

• IT Leader: A Business Leader responsible for delivering technology solutions that enable the business.
• IT Analyst: Interprets business analyst inputs/requirements in the context of IT capabilities, works with team on IT-based business process improvement.
• IT Architect: Defines basic operational imperatives in the provisioning of IT services with a focus on resiliency, reuse and adaptability.
• IT Developer: Follows IT architectural principles to create "building blocks" for the construction of applications.

Whew! Imagine putting a mashup together where you needed four different roles to put an idea together before tossing it over the wall to IT where four more roles did the implementation. I'm not saying this is too much for BPM. High-value and highly-complex systems need governance and discipline during their ideation and construction, regardless of whether they are implemented as a custom application built from scratch by App Dev, or as a business process built atop a BPMS.

What I'm saying is this is too much for mashups.

The premise of Serena's paper on the long tail of applications development is that there are many applications that IT never implements because they aren't high value or complex enough to merit IT involvement. This is 'The Long Tail' of Applications Development. At the time we wrote the paper I thought that BPM could be one of the answers. After all, BPM was all about empowering the business to define and build applications.

And that's where I made my bloomer. Mashups need to be easy to build, easy to deploy and easy to maintain. Mashups need some governance, as I've written about here, here, and here. (Yes, this is a subject I care about.) Just not as much as an expensive and complex App Dev initiative. They also need some lifecycle management. Again just not as much as a typical App Dev initiative.

Now I'll go on record as saying they don't need as much governance and lifecycle management as Big BPM either.

Applications Development has a long tail, a tail that can be serviced, in part, through the use of mashups. Contrary to what I've said before, BPM also has a long tail. A tail that can be serviced, in part, through the use of mashups.

What I won't say any more is that BPM is a business mashup platform. It may look the same. It may act the same, but it isn't the same at all.

Dapper has a lot of promise, but boy can it be annoying!

I haven't done a review in a while, so I thought I'd get back into it, starting with Dapper. I came across them in a Hinchcliffe blog entry about the most promising mashup tools. He had Dapper on the list, along with other more well-known tools such as JackBe, who still won't let me test their product.

Dapper allows developers to pull content from websites and expose them using various APIs. There is nothing new about this. Nearly all the products I've reviewed have this capability. Dapper differentiates itself with the number of different APIs it supports, which I'll get to later. The list is very impressive, but doesn't include SOAP.

Too bad about SOAP, but I understand. SOAP is overkill for screen scraped content. You don't need transactional integrity or security (not that SOAP has that problem licked) if you're just pulling read-only content from a page. Still, it does mean I can't use the content in something like a BPEL orchestration. Clearly that use isn't something Dapper has in mind. Then again, neither did Intel MashMaker or Kapow.

For consistency with my other reviews, I attempted to create a feed from the news page on the Serena website. No luck. Dapper couldn't load the page. So next I went to Digg to add recent news items. While Dapper loaded the page, it scrambled the page elements. I couldn't pull the top news stories from digg/science or digg/technology.

Next I went to my own blog to see if I could pull my content into a feed. I know, everyone can already get a blog as a feed, but this was an experiment. The instructions for Dapper say its selection algorithm will work better with multiple similar pages, so I added the links for my most recent three posts and went to the next step, selecting the contents to scrape.

Unlike other screen scraping technologies I've played with, Dapper has some smarts built in. Their algorithm supposedly helps mashers select the right content to pull into the API without having to mess around with Xpath. Well, certainly there is an algorithm in place, but I found it much more of an annoyance than a help. I couldn't get selections to work correctly, and when I tried to de-select manually, I got a page script error and the interface stopped in its tracks. I couldn't interact with the application at all, and had to reload the entire page with a new URL.

I went back to the start and tried it again, and got similar results, except that I didn't even try manually de-selecting page elements. Instead I wondered if I should not give Dapper multiple pages to work with. I selected 'Back' in the interface to return to the page where I selected my inputs, intending to remove all but the latest blog entry. And guess what?

Right! I got an error on the page again. The 'Back' link didn't work either. At least this time the interface didn't freeze up.

After a while I defined something close to the selections I wanted. (I never did get the exact content.) And now for the reason Dapper is different. The reason I kept playing with Dapper despite its many flaws: I could expose the content as POX, RSS, Filtered RSS, HTML, a Google gadget, a Netvibes module, a PageFlake, a Google map, an image loop, an iCalendar, Atom, CSV, JSON, XSL, YAML or even as an email. True, a lot of these formats don't make sense for blog content, but it's nice to have the option.

I especially liked the preview that let me take a look at the content before finalizing my output format choice. That was sweet.

Bottom line. I wouldn't use Dapper today for production mashups. It just isn't ready. However, when Dapper fixes their algorithm so it isn't annoying, when they do some serious debugging, when they fix their performance issues and when they otherwise clean up their usability, it will be one killer application for creating mashable content.

The reports of IT's death are greatly exagerated. Or are they?

It’s been a while since I wrote in this blog. I’ve had a lot of things happen, so I hope you will all forgive me. First, Marketing decided they couldn’t afford a pet nerd any more, so I had to find another job. I can’t blame them. They’ve let me run wild for a year, reading and writing and playing with software. How many people get to do their dream job for even a year?

Serena’s professional services department has taken me on to do for a fee what I used to do for free: give advice to customers about best practices with respect to ALM, SOA Governance, Agile development, Web 2.0 and mashups. I’ll still have the chance to read and write, and I’ll get involved with customers earlier in our relationship. In all, a very fair trade.

I also took a vacation before hitting the ground in services. I’ve been a skier for 20 years or so, but decided to put them aside for the week and learn to board. Why? I had become complacent and was no longer progressing or pushing myself. I wanted something new, and decided to try the board. Having heard from other skiers that it’s very hard to switch, especially at my age, I deliberately left my skis at home.

A week later I had a bruised tailbone, a wrenched shoulder, a twisted knee, possibly a broken thumb and a couple of very sore wrists. I also can ride. Not well. Not nearly as well as I skied. But even though I’m back on the greens, I’ve progressed.

I’m back now and I’d like to talk about a post by ZD Net blogger Michael Krigsman. In his recent post he talks about the very real possibility that IT will become an endangered species, going the way of the steno pool, vast accounting departments keeping the books with adding machines, and company cars. The article was interesting, citing the now dusty ‘IT as commodity’ argument as well as a number of others. Not quite as interesting as the article are the comments. Except for a very few insightful posts, they fall into three categories.

• IT sucks and deserves to die.
• Tech illiterate users suck and will beg IT for mercy when their systems crash.
• IT isn’t going away, it’s just evolving into a new life form.

They remind me of what poses as political debate on slashdot. “Democrats suck.” “No! Republicans suck!” “No! Democrats suck.” And so on. I keep reading because once in a while I come across some creative invective that makes it all worthwhile. In case you were wondering, there wasn't any noteworthy invective in the comments.

When I first read the article I believed Krigsman was being deliberately provocative. I thought, "He’s picking a fight. I know it, he knows it and I bet everyone else knows it too." Once I started considering his points, however, I wasn't so sure. In fact, I think all three conclusions posted by Krigsman's readers have some truth. In some cases IT does deserve to die, in some cases users will still rely heavily on IT, and in some cases IT will survive, just not in it's current form.

Krigsman bases his predictions on seven trends, but I think there are really only three: IT is a commodity, IT isn’t in tune with the business, and the world is changing around IT.

IT is a commodity. Krigsman cites three different examples of IT as a commodity. First, IT has become defensive rather than offensive as applications such as email become as necessary to everyone as electricity. This is the argument Carr made in his post dot-com article about why IT doesn’t matter. Second, applications that used to be differentiators, such as CRM, are now so standard they can be offered as a service, completely bypassing the need for IT support. Salesforce.com is the poster child for SaaS, but many others exist, and even venerable enterprise app vendors such as SAP are planning to offer their software through subscription services. Third, software vendors are volume pricing their offerings, pushing IT organizations to make single-vendor deals. In other words, vendors such as Microsoft and IBM are pricing their offerings as commodities.

But is it a valid argument that IT as a commodity means IT is doomed to extinction? Most IT professionals would say, “No.” Older, established capabilities such as file servers, email, and enterprise apps may move outside of the firewall, but there will always be the need for newer and better capabilities that haven’t yet been commoditized.

I’m not sure either position is correct. If all a company needs is vanilla IT, then it doesn’t make sense to maintain an internal IT organization. If all you need is standard power, would you bother generating your own, or would you buy it from the grid? In some cases, however, innovative IT is a strategic weapon, not merely a defensive necessity. Wal-Mart, Google, eBay and Amazon have shown that IT can be such a weapon. Businesses that differentiate based on innovative customer interaction, a hyper-lean supply chain or platform as a service, are going to need their own IT.

The bottom line is that commoditized IT will put some, but not all, internal IT departments out of business.

IT is out of touch with the business. Krigsman discusses two manifestations of this root cause: IT leadership is alienated from corporate senior management, and corporate senior management doesn’t understand how IT can be a strategic asset.

Both of these points have the ring of truth. Where IT is a provider of services rather than a business partner, IT is nothing but a defensive necessity and the CIO merely a cost cutter, probably reporting to the CFO. Under those circumstances, why would senior leadership pay attention? Would the CEO reserve a place on the board for the person responsible for ordering the most cost effective paper clips? A corollary would be that senior leadership also won’t understand how IT can be a strategic asset rather than a cost center.

But does this signal the end of IT? Again, not necessarily. Let’s consider Wal-Mart versus K-Mart. K-Mart didn’t care about IT and didn’t consider IT as a strategic asset. Wal-Mart did, and put in place a supply chain system that drove K-Mart into bankruptcy. K-Mart's IT definitely took a hit then, although I bet is has rebounded since, and not merely as a provider of email. In the Darwinian business world, organizations win when they make the best use of their strategic assets. They lose when they don’t.

So the bottom line is similar. Where the IT/business divide is strong, it will put some internal IT organizations out of business.

The world is changing, lessening the need for IT. We won’t need IT because we can get everything we need from enterprise-ready consumer-inspired apps. These apps are getting to market faster and better fueled by VC investments.

This is a hotly debated topic, very much tied up with Enterprise 2.0 and mashup debates. The business wishes that it were true, IT knows it isn’t. The reality is somewhere in between. I already use Facebook and LinkedIn as much as corporate email for business correspondence. I don’t need an intranet to share content. We happen to have a wiki set up for internal use, not supported by IT by the way, but if it wasn’t there I’d use pbwiki. I can share presentations on Facebook, documents on Google and important links on del.icio.us. Mashup tools such as Serena Business Mashups (OK, you knew I had to work self-promotion in someshere.) will soon be good enough to enable end users to construct their own non-critical applications.

But these apps, because they are available for everyone to use, won't be strategic differentiators. At least not for long. And as for building my own applications, I may be able to use mashup tools, but I need a SOA infrastructure in place to provide the services that I'll mash. There is a place for IT, even in companies that rely heavily on readily available consumer-oriented applications. Just not the same IT.

And the bottom line is the same. Some internal IT will go under, but not all.

What does it all mean? Statistics tells us that the probability of combined events may approach zero even if the individual probabilities of the events are nowhere near zero. So while none of these three trends will take IT down, their combined influences will take a toll.

I’m bullish about IT professionals, but bearish about the current structure of internal IT organizations. Can we assume that IT professionals will continue to concentrate on keeping the LAN operational, providing desktop support, email and file servers? I wouldn't make that assumption. Will internal app dev departments continue to build applications that take years to create and months to modify? I'm not sure how much longer the business will be willing to fund such an organization.

Will there be a place for IT professionals who keep their skills fresh, engage with the business and provide input on how IT can become a strategic weapon? That's a bet I'd make. But it requires that we IT workers change the way we do business. We've got to learn new skills, keep fresh, bounce around new ideas even if someone tells us why we can't do it that way.

It’s time to leave the skis at home, endure the bumps and bruises and the ignomy of being back on the greens, and move forward.