Jack SantosA recent New York Times article on an outsourcing trend in the public sector, and a video summary.
I wonder if this is the model for Enterprise IT in the future? Some think it is. In fact, some think it’s the model for enterprises as a whole, with only a core management team in place (even the CEO is on contract). Maybe.
OTOH, for an enterprise to survive long term it must innovate, change, adapt. I don’t think these outsourcing models allow you to do that easily – they only optimize the current paradigm. Can one make the argument that the public sector is, by definition, not meant to innovate – only deliver defined services at the lowest possible cost?
I don’t think so. In fact, I would argue that one of the issues with the public sector, currently, is that it isn’t innovating fast enough; unions, pension obligations, etc. prevent that from happening. For example, rather than image documents and make services available online, many states and municipalities still lean toward the desk-bound service model – go to a physical building, ask a person, wait…etc etc. And because that generates jobs, there is a lot of pressure not to change that. One can also make the point that the current round of financial challenges for states and cities, due to the aftermath of the great recession, is a counter balance to that: innovate or go bankrupt.
For enterprise IT all these trends and observations just highlight the changing role of IT. IT, for enterprises to survive, must not only help deliver services efficiently and effectively – it also needs to be the focal point for innovation and “new thought”: new ways of doing things, new products, new business models. The only question I have is if that were all true, why would we call it “IT”?
We’ll be talking about these and other issues about IT career planning and alternative IT roles at our Catalyst Conference in August…
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