We don’t always get our vision of the future correct. Science Fiction is the best example of this. The 1982 Science Fiction movie “Blade Runner” depicts a world of the year 2019 full of very human like androids but void of cell phones. The central character, Rick Deckard played by Harrison Ford, drove a hovercraft and chased after human like androids but makes phone calls from phone booths throughout the movie. It isn’t the lack of androids in our current world that I find amusing; it is the fact that cell phones caught us by surprise.
Today, people are questioning if our vision of the future IT department should be adjusted. The status quo of network engineers, programmers, and desktop computers loaded with licensed software may disappear like the phone booth has largely disappeared from our malls and sidewalks. But like the phone booth, change won’t happen unless a better, cheaper solution is presented.
Two new technologies have the potential to provide quality improvements at a lower cost than the status quo IT department of today: cloud computing and software as a service. Cloud computing allows anyone to rent the use of a computer or fraction of a computer. The computer is purchased, maintained, upgraded, and supplied with Internet connectivity and security by some professional utility. You pay them a small monthly fee for remote access. Software as a Service follows a similar pattern, but adds software to the hardware.
Given this scenario, the corporate office loses its population of IT professionals. They now work for the remote provider. The idea is similar to paying ADP to process your payroll. Your bookkeeper and accountant work for them and your expenses go down. Your office has personal computers, but each computer is connected to the Internet and has little more than a browser or some basic software.
Nicholas Carr has written two popular articles and a book about this concept. The more recent article published in the MIT Sloan Management Review predicts the future of computing to follow the course that brought us electric utilities. Initially, electricity was generated internally by factories and small communities. Eventually the cost savings of having one large utility handle all of the electricity generation became established across the country because it provided more stable electricity at a low cost.
Gianpaolo Carraro leads the charge at Microsoft for Software as a Service. He disagrees with Carr and argues that the desktop, with all of its licensed software, is here to stay. His argument fits the history of phone service well. After all, we all want our own phones rather than rent a phone from the phone "utility". But the difference is the phone company provides the phone software as part of the deal rather than a separate and significant charge. When something goes wrong, we call one provider rather than a mix of hardware and software vendors.
I don’t know what the future holds, but I do think it will be different from what we experience today. Too many people today are frustrated with the status quo. But whether it is an electric company scenario or cell phone scenario is going to depend on the effectiveness of the different companies providing services in each model.