The Future of the IT Role in Business

   The Technology field is one of the fastest changing industries there is today.  Both technologies and methodologies are being created and deprecated on a monthly basis.  What works today probably won't work next week  It's all we can do to keep up sometimes and we're caught between a rock (company management) and a hard place (best practice).

Da cloud! Da cloud!

   I was inspired by Breffni's recent post as well as this Slashdot video to think about what it will mean to be in IT in the future.  With security breaches growing, it's going to be more and more important for companies to invest in some type of security infrastructure to keep their data and customers safe.  The Cloud also makes it interesting, as a lot of companies think they can just go all Cloud and not need dedicated people.  There is also the new buzzword, hyper-convergence that I expect to start really making waves in infrastructure in the next year.  The landscape is getting more complex and simplified at the same time.  So where does that leave us IT pros?

   I currently work at a community bank as the IT Manager.  The weird thing with the position is I don't have staff in the traditional sense.  My staff are the Managed Services Providers, MSPs, that the bank has contracted with.  I think my position is a good representation of how small and medium sized businesses, SMBs, will run their IT.  They'll have a small internal IT staff and working with other companies for specific requirements.  That's where the Cloud comes in.  Office 365 has been a major hit.  I hear IT pros across the board praising what it does for us as IT and what it offers businesses.  Honestly, only Enterprise or MSPs need to even think about having on-site exchange any more, it's just too much for anything smaller.  "If we can go Cloud, then why do we need IT still?" you may ask from a business perspective.  It's about time and expertise.

   I've dealt with many small companies who have no dedicated IT person, just simply assigns those tasks to the employee who can work a computer the best.  Could they manage the company's IT Cloud infrastructure?  Sure, most of those products aren't complicated, but do you really want to spend their time on that?  Do they have the experience and expertise to handle compliance and security?  Us IT pros need to spend more time growing our security and compliance knowledge so we can leverage that to keep company's safe.  We need to get ourselves in a position to show that we'll keep the business safe and running in the increasingly dangerous world of the Internet.

   Data breaches aren't going to go away, they are becoming an expected cost of running a business.  At the same time, technology is getting more complicated and simpler to work with.  IT won't be disappearing, but our roles will be adjusting.  More companies will outsource their IT needs, but will still need someone in-house that isn't biased to help guide the helm.

And as always, stay safe goblins.

SHARE

About Jimmy R. Tassin

Jimmy Tassin is the IT Manager of Midwest Regional Bank and has been involved with the Technology field for over thirteen years. His two hobbies are overseeing the daily operations of OmniKraft, a Minecraft server community, and writing at Goblinbyte.com.