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The straggling vestiges of humanity crouch down amidst the technological rubble of a ruined city. The few who survive are hunted day and night by Skynet micro-turbine airborne Hunter-Killers. Is it the plot to the new Terminator movie? Perhaps.
Rather, the Antisocial Regime in Enterprise IT has begun.
Flying under the banner of “Rationalization,” the new leadership of IT is rewarded for reducing headcount, consolidating infrastructure and pulling the plug on as many projects as possible. IT leadership-by-Excel-spreadsheet and a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mindset rule the day.
Out of the baking desert sun, IT thinkers collected together during the recent Forrester IT Forum to hear Dana Deasy, CIO and group vice president of British Petroleum (formerly of General Motors), talk about his first 100 days on the job. By the end of his first year, Mr. Deasy had cut US$400 million dollars out of the annual IT budget of the fourth largest company on earth, including reducing headcount by 500 people under a radical regime of “IT Rationalization.”
This is not your father’s IT cost-reduction program. Instead of operational metrics and iterative cost reduction, this paradigm speaks to wholesale rip and replace, multidivisional shutdowns, and a violent pace of change.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer, things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
Cost is offloaded offshore. Entire operations are handed over to contractors. Experience and relationships are flushed out in favor of contractors who are cheaper to eliminate. Make no mistake, consultants and outsourcers want your job, and they will feast on your remains. It’s easy to say that this is shortsighted, but CIOs are talking about their “first hundred days” and have a job life expectancy of 22 months on average. With statistics like this, shortsightedness is a success criterion. Someone else will pay for this season’s mistakes.
Last one out the door, hand the keys over to IBM.
Developers may feel insulated from this trend. The “antisocial” aspects of the “internal cloud” affect IT operations staff. But as the business begins rearchitecting, business rules and business processes and more abstract layers of logic are emerging that take over many of the functions of software development. Developers need to embrace these tools or risk being on the wrong side of IT history.