KEY POINTS:
Anyone who's ever had a run-in with the company IT department will be heartened by a new book from former Harvard Business Review editor Nicholas Carr.
His latest effort, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, forecasts the demise of IT departments altogether.
When interactions
with IT staff are commonly along the lines of "reduce the size of your mail file or you will no longer be able to send messages" and "access to that website is denied" or "you must have administrator's rights to install that incredibly useful piece of software", Carr's message of doom is sure to be toasted around many a water cooler.
But there should be more significant reasons to cheer when the IT Nazis are gone. Their extinction will come when organisations no longer require their own rooms full of computer servers to run the software they depend on. Instead, computing services will be provided by utilities, in the same way as electricity and water.
To those who've watched computing fashions change over the decades, what Carr is suggesting looks like the return of flared trousers. In the early days of computing, during the 1970s and 1980s, many big organisations had their computer processing done by bureaus. Small outfits simply couldn't afford computers.
In the 1990s, PCs proliferated, so that now every organisation in the land has a computer network. Only the smallest don't have a server at the heart of the network to handle email and other centralised functions. In charge is either a dedicated IT staffer or an administration person who got the job by default.
But, in truth, flared pants never went away. Many large organisations have always contracted out their processing requirements. What is different is that Carr's computing utility companies, the likes of Google and Microsoft, will supply even very small organisations. They will do so from huge data centres that customers will connect to via the internet.
If anyone doubts it, he points to YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google Search, Yahoo Mail, Flickr - so-called web 2.0 sites - which are like programs that run on the internet rather than on individual PCs. "Our own personal PCs, not to mention our cellphones and gaming consoles, are turning into terminals hooked up to that big shared computer," Carr says.
An excellent thing it is, too, says Ian Mitchell, whose Auckland company specialises in providing software as a service. So long as there's nothing unique about the software, an organisation gains no advantage from owning it and running it in-house.
And if delivered by a utility, he says they stand to make considerable savings. "Right now, for any business except, say, the top 20 in New Zealand, and maybe another couple of hundred small businesses that are in some sense unique, there is absolutely no reason for them to buy software," says Mitchell.
Wellington software company Xero is the living incarnation of the utility computing customer.
Founder and boss Rod Drury says Xero pays a supplier for email and phone services, letting the company put its money into writing software.
Xero is poised to cash in on the utility computing boom. Its product is an accounting program which is sold under the software-as-a-service model.
But he points out a catch, particularly evident in New Zealand: innovation at the software level is outpacing infrastructure investment, so if utility computing really takes off, the telecommunications network could buckle under the load.
Carr, from a part of the world where broadband internet services are a given, is worried by something else: that the accumulation by the utility companies of information about their customers allows for "a powerful new kind of control" that could be mischievously wielded.
Some might say, though, that is a worthwhile trade-off for liberation from the IT department.
* Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland-based technology journalist
