The Business System Spectator
Is Business 2.0 Assisting to Kill From the IT Department? What arranged me off about this post had not been the part about “Enterprise 2.0,” however the part about “killing from the IT department.” I am reading articles like this since I started dealing with IT several decades ago. About every 10 years roughly, some new technology comes along that observers trumpet as so radical and innovative that it will result in nothing significantly less than the loss of life of the corporate IT department.
And each time, IT adapts ultimately, though initially it may resist. As I recall, the first death knell was sounded when PCs arrived. These began turning up in businesses in a huge way in the past due 1970s. At the right time, I was working as a production systems analyst for an oil-field services firm.
I was amid gathering requirements for a custom system that could take care of tooling inventory on the shop floor. Day One, I went out to go to the tool crib in one of our plants and found that my users got already built their own tooling inventory system using a TRS-80 PC from Radio Shack. They said they didn’t need help from corporate IT.
It required more than 10 years–some might say, 15-20 years–for IT to determine how to adjust to the PC revolution. The first big concern was “connectivity.” Users were buying computers, then spending a significant amount of time re-keying data from mainframe-printed reports into PC spreadsheets. …
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