The Daily Network Monitor

The SaaS web-based application delivery model provides corporations with hosted set of business centric applications without a need to purchase, maintain or customize the application to fit their unique needs. 

Many organizations have adopted this model for sales, procurement, CRM and human resources applications for example. Unlike the traditional software acquisition model, where a corporation invests in an application and is required to build the infrastructure to support the application, SaaS requires negligible upfront investment beyond user training. Application maintenance, upgrades and development are the SaaS provider’s responsibility. This is a very attractive value model for many companies. 

When SaaS web-based applications are being evaluated and purchased by a corporation, the IT and network management functions are usually not included in the planning, evaluation and decision process, as IT is perceived as a roadblock. Most frequently, this effort is driven by the business unit or department accessing the application.

This lack of cooperation can cause problems to IT and network management after the application is brought on-line. IT and network management discover the application is deployed and being accessed after the fact. Usually when users contact IT or network management to complain about application performance as the application is bandwidth intensive or existing network infrastructure is near capacity. Another factor to consider is since all SaaS based applications are connected through the Internet outside of the managed corporate network infrastructure, they are subject to any number of issues including forwarding delays, connection reliability and traffic contention. 

Business units evaluating SaaS as an option need to include IT and network management to allow for resource planning and monitoring of end-to-end SaaS specific application traffic to ensure that availability and performance expectations are achieved.

Who is more demanding, the IT employee or the IT manager? The general consensus is that the IT employees are.  A recent survey shows that 18 to 31 year old IT professionals are more demanding than previous generations and are disillusioned faster. Many millennials expect that they will immediately start at the top and receive higher starting base pay. As a result, many IT organizations are finding increased turnover as employees find out that they actually have to work their way up as previous generations did.

As baby-boomers retire and leave an expertise gap, the next generation can learn a lot from these “experts” not only in gaining IT experience, but also in how to understand and manage themselves and the work environment they find themselves in. My advice is find a mentor and soak everything up like a sponge. Eventually, you will be the older generation and be facing the same dilemma with the next generation of “millennials”.

Well, it’s not all as earth-shaking as that, but I’m getting tired of grabby headlines that loudly announce or predict the death of this or that.  Starting with disco, hardly anything is as dead as people like to say.  Cultural trends and technologies alike are much more prone to mutate and evolve or get reborn or remixed than to actually die. (Has anybody else noticed that the Apple Newton didn’t quite die, but got reborn first as the Palm Pilot and then the iPod Touch, and you can bet next week’s MacWorld will give birth to more…)

So you can understand my mixed feelings at Carolyn Duffy Marsan’s well-reasoned but poorly-headlined piece in Network World, The IT department is dead, author argues, which reviews Nicholas Carr’s book of the moment, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.  You may remember Carr for asking Does IT Matter? in his 2004 book of the same title.

IT isn’t dead, IT departments are not dead, and IT professionals are not dead.  Far from it.  In fact, I think they’re all feeling much better and might even get up and go for a walk.

Now, that said, this certainly doesn’t mean that IT departments are going to be able to sit around and do what they’ve always done for years and get away with it.  They will adapt or they will in fact die.  To borrow one of Carr’s analogies, just because few if any businesses today generate their own power on-site does’t mean that there’s no market for power or people skilled in generating it.  Those professionals just had to make some adjustments in their skills and career paths.

What Carr and many others - notably Google - are getting at is that lots of parts of IT are getting commodified (that means made into a commodity, not thrown in the commode), getting turned into utilities and getting outsourced or shared.  The role of a small or mid-sized business IT pro is going to evolve in two ways because of this:

1. In-house IT will have to get skilled at managing the IT utilites: they will have to select, monitor and integrate rather than provide these kinds of services themselves

2. In-house IT will become more and more concerned with applications and business results and less concerned with infrastructure and connectivity

I think you’ll agree that neither trend will do much to reduce the demand for in-house IT.  Web-based software sold on the ASP model hasn’t put IT managers out on the street, it’s just given them new and even more interesting and valuable responsibilities.  If that’s dead, then I’ve got a deathwish, for sure.