The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

Takeaway: The IT profession and the IT job market are in the midst of seismic changes that are going to shift the focus to three types of jobs.

There’s a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It’s a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salaries by getting training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candidate for a key position in a thinly-stretched job market. At the time, IT was held up as one of the professions of the future, where more and more of the best jobs would be migrating as computer-automated processes replaced manual ones.

Unfortunately, that idea of the future has disappeared, or at least morphed into something much different.

IT Professionals

The glory days when IT pros could name their ticket evaporated when the Y2K crisis passed and then the dot com implosion happened. Suddenly, companies didn’t need as many coders on staff. Suddenly, there were a lot fewer startups buying servers and hiring sysadmins to run them.

Around the same time, there was also a general backlash against IT in corporate America. Many companies had been throwing nearly-endless amounts of money at IT projects in the belief that tech was the answer to all problems. Because IT had driven major productivity improvements during the 1990s, a lot of companies over-invested in IT and tried to take it too far too fast. As a result, there were a lot of very large, very expensive IT projects that crashed and burned.

When the recession of 2001 hit, these massively overbuilt IT departments were huge targets for budget cuts and many of them got hit hard. As the recession dragged out in 2002 and 2003, IT pros mostly told each other that they needed to ride out the storm and that things would bounce back. But, a strange thing happened. IT budgets remained flat year after year. The rebound never happened.

Fast forward to 2011. Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they’ve outsourced much of the data center altogether. These were the jobs that were at the center of the IT pro boom in 1999. Today, they haven’t totally disappeared, but there certainly isn’t a shortage of available workers or a high demand for those skill sets.

That’s because the IT environment has changed dramatically. More and more of traditional software has moved to the web, or at least to internal servers and served through a web browser. Many technophobic Baby Boomers have left the workforce and been replaced by Millennials who not only don’t need as much tech support, but often want to choose their own equipment and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity. In other words, today’s users don’t need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will argue this until they are blue in the face, but it’s true. Most workers have now been using technology for a decade or more and have become more proficient than they were a decade ago. Plus, the software itself has gotten better. It’s still horribly imperfect, but it’s better.

So where does that leave today’s IT professionals? Where will the IT jobs of the future be?

1. Consultants

IT Consultancy

Let’s face it, all but the largest enterprises would prefer to not to have any IT professionals on staff, or at least as few as possible. It’s nothing personal against geeks, it’s just that IT pros are expensive and when IT departments get too big and centralized they tend to become experts at saying, “No.” They block more progress than they enable. As a result, we’re going to see most of traditional IT administration and support functions outsourced to third-party consultants. This includes a wide range from huge multi-national consultancies to the one person consultancy who serves as the rented IT department for local SMBs. I’m also lumping in companies like IBM, HP, Amazon AWS, and Rackspace, who will rent out both data center capacity and IT professionals to help deploy, manage, and troubleshoot solutions. Many of the IT administrators and support professionals who currently work directly for corporations will transition to working for big vendors or consultancies in the future as companies switch to purchasing IT services on an as-needed basis in order to lower costs, get a higher level of expertise, and get 24/7/365 coverage.

2. Project managers

IT Project Managers

Most of the IT workers that survive and remain as employees in traditional companies will be project managers. They will not be part of a centralized IT department, but will be spread out in the various business units and departments. They will be business analysts who will help the company leaders and managers make good technology decisions. They will gather business requirements and communicate with stakeholders about the technology solutions they need, and will also be proactive in looking for new technologies that can transform the business. These project managers will also serve as the company’s point of contact with technology vendors and consultants. If you look closely, you can already see a lot of current IT managers morphing in this direction.

3. Developers

Software Development

By far, the area where the largest number of IT jobs is going to move is into developer, programmer, and coder jobs. While IT used to be about managing and deploying hardware and software, it’s going to increasingly be about web-based applications that will be expected to work smoothly, be self-evident, and require very little training or intervention from tech support. The other piece of the pie will be mobile applications — both native apps and mobile web apps. The current changes in IT are “shifting more of the power in the tech industry away from those who deploy and support apps to those who build them.” This trend is already underway and it’s only going to accelerate over the next decade.

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The 10 best ways to visually represent IT data

The 10 best ways to visually represent IT data


In all areas of IT, there are a number of situations where certain ways of presenting data, configuration details, or a sequence of events work best. We often tend to rely on one tool for everything because we’re familiar with it, but that isn’t always the best approach. Here is my top 10 list of the most effective ways to visually represent IT data.


1) Network connectivity — Microsoft Visio


Visio is a capable tool for documenting network connectivity. It’s not the right tool for documenting the configuration, but it does a good job of outlining the logical layout. From a top-down perspective, I feel Visio does this best. Figure A shows a sample network diagram that clearly shows the logical layout of the network.


Figure A

Figure A

2) Application layout and architecture — Microsoft Visio


Let’s face it: Applications can get complex today. Virtual machines, replicated databases, firewall configurations, virtual IP addresses, mobile applications, and more make documenting an application flow no easy task. Again, I’ve found Visio to be the tool that reigns supreme. In the example shown in Figure B, many complicated aspects of the infrastructure are represented visually in one flow. While it doesn’t address the details of aspects such as the database replication, it is a good springboard to those other areas of key content.


Figure B

Figure B

3) Free disk space — Pie charts


I’m not really a fan of pie charts, but they do the trick for representing free space on a disk. This can be Windows drives as well as critical volumes, such as a VMware VMFS datastore or a drive on a storage area network (SAN). The pie chart is a veteran at representing free space, and in the example shown in Figure C, you can see its effectiveness for this application. But take a pie chart with a grain of salt. We need to visualize how much drive space is used as well as how much free space is available.


Figure C

Figure C

4) Year-over-year performance tracking — Excel 3D bar charts


For tracking performance year over year for a moving target, I find that the 3D bar charts within Excel do a good job of showing the progress. It doesn’t have to be year over year, either; it can represent quarterly assessments or even a comparison of something, such as different offices. In my work experience, I created a simple 3D bar chart within Excel that looked something like the one in Figure D to track progress moving to virtual machines from physical servers.


Figure D

Figure D

5) Consumption compared to other like entities — Excel Bubble charts


Quickly visualizing the consumption in proportion to other like consumers is easy with the bubble chart. One common example is representing the number of servers (or PCs) in a given location, which the bubble chart in Figure E does well. But it’s important to note that there is a significant limitation with the bubble chart: It assumes that all items are equal consumers. A good example would be 100 file servers compared to 100 Oracle database servers. In most situations, the file servers require much less maintenance and resources than the database servers. Nonetheless, the bubble chart is effective in displaying numbers by category.


Figure E

Figure E

6) Performance reporting — Line graphs


The line graph is a good way to represent direct consumption. A number of tools utilize the line graph for this function, including the VMware vSphere Client, shown in Figure F. But the line graph also has a limitation: If the tool displaying the consumption does any normalization of data, there may be missing highs or lows. To be fair, when there is so much data to manage, normalization of performance data is a common occurrence.


Figure F

Figure F

7) Step-by-step procedures — Camtasia Studio


When it comes to showing something onscreen, the de facto standard for recording the activity for replay is Camtasia Studio (Figure G). Camtasia has all the features you would want, including voice overlay and easy uploads to popular sites such as YouTube. This is a good way to practice a presentation and deliver solid emphasis without having to reinvent the wheel every time. I’ve also used Camtasia a number of times for prerecording demos to play during live presentations. Pausing the recording to explain an important point or field a question isn’t as distracting as interrupting a live demo. Even if I am giving a live demo, a Camtasia recording is a nice backup or “emergency demo,” if I need it.


Figure G

Figure G

8) Topics in outline form — Microsoft PowerPoint


There are a number of strategies for creating and delivering PowerPoint presentations (and presentations in general). But PowerPoint is especially useful for creating an outline that can be conversationally discussed (Figure H). I’ve learned a few tricks over the years: Never have a presentation go longer than 59 minutes and 59 seconds; don’t cover more than three main topics per slide; and make the outline focus primarily on the problem, which you can then backfill with the solution.


Figure H

Figure H

9) Customized maps — Microsoft Visio


Visio has map stencil objects (Figure I) you can use to document all kinds of things, such as assigning territories within a business and mapping out network and datacenter connectivity. You can download the map stencils from Microsoft (click the Find Shapes Online option). A U.S. stencil and a world stencil are available for modern Visio versions.


Figure I

Figure I

10) Specific data sets –Webdesigner Depot


This awesome resource has a number of links to tools that provide specific visualizations of things such as Internet trending topics and the Internet as a whole, as well as images of an event or even the history of science. Figure J shows a good way to visualize current events on the Internet using Web Trend Map 4. The popular Infographic series is also a great resource that will inspire new ways to present data in an interpretable manner.


Figure J

Figure J