The IT department is dead

So here is a nice review of the new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google by Nicolas Carr.

Carr points out that market forces will ultimately kill the IT department:

“The replication of tens of thousands of independent data centers, all
using similar hardware, running similar software, and employing similar
kinds of workers, has imposed severe economic penalties on the
economy,” he writes. “It has led to the overbuilding of IT assets in
every sector of the economy, dampening the productivity gains that can
spring from computer automation.”

The really interesting question is this: Why is the dead man still walking?  Cold, hard business decisions should have buried IT already; real businesses are hemorrhaging real money.  Read the whole review here:

The IT department is dead, author argues - Network World

“In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form,” Carr writes. “It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people.”