Technology threatens to eliminate many of today’s network administration positions, although industry watchers predict more strategic IT jobs to evolve.
Editor’s note: This is the final installment of a five-part series on the threats facing IT executives and how to mitigate them.
An old IT industry joke suggests automation will be so prevalent in future data centers that the only staff on hand will be a man and a dog: The man’s job is to feed the dog, and the dog’s job is to ensure the man doesn’t touch the computer.
While the scenario of such an automated IT environment gets laughs among network executives, the premise isn’t so far-fetched anymore. Today, automation technology has evolved beyond simple system monitoring to dynamic provisioning and reallocating of data center resources. New technologies such as virtualization are designed to further remove the need for human intervention from day-to-day data center operations – making the prospect of being displaced by technology no laughing matter to some.
According to Gartner, 90% of the work of IT departments surveyed last year will be automated, outsourced or absorbed by other business units by 2015. The research firm also predicts that twice as many jobs will be lost between 2005 and 2015 because of IT automation, as compared with IT outsourcing. Lastly, Gartner says it expects a typical IT department of 100 employees today to shrink to between six and 15 employees by 2015.
Time will tell if the numbers will hold true, but in the meantime, industry watchers and IT executives say when faced with such a bleak outlook for the future, one has to read between the lines. If automation is forecast to eliminate most of today’s IT jobs, then the assumption should be that tomorrow’s IT jobs would encompass a new set of skills yet to be tackled by technology or technicians. For instance, network operations positions would adapt into managers of strategic technology, and application maintenance roles could evolve into business services managers.
“I have been in IT for more than 30 years and I have heard about the threat of automation since Day One,” says Shivaji Huttler, database and data warehouse manager for the city of Boise, Idaho. “It’s really only a threat to individuals who aren’t willing to adapt and evolve.”
Huttler says without automation he’d be shackled to a database anxiously pouring over logs to determine if anything had gone awry. With BMC Software’s Patrol automated monitoring tools in place to alert him of performance exceptions, he is free to diagnose higher-level problems and use his knowledge for business-oriented planning.
“Automation increases my productivity and empowers me with more knowledge because I am not focused on repetitive, manual tasks,” Huttler says. “Databases are pretty straightforward; the exciting part is using the data toward business intelligence goals.”
Huttler admits his IT operations remain far from the dynamic data centers envisioned by vendors such as HP, IBM and others, but his attitude could guarantee him a job when automation technology takes over more manual tasks.
“If you look at the big picture, automation will predominantly lead to advancement for motivated IT professionals,” says Terry Phillips, branch manager at IT staffing firm Robert Half Technology in Columbus, Ohio.
Network administrator roles might be the first positions replaced by automation, but the people filling the positions could develop their skills in niche technologies such as security, wireless or network architecture to move from an operations job to a more strategic position for the time being. Positions in project management, compliance management and business process management could crop up as network administrator jobs fall off.
“There are soft skills that humans possess and technology cannot automate, especially if it’s specific to one company or type of business,” Phillips says. “In some cases, automation may replace a human position for the short term, but if the IT department is thinking strategically, those positions manifest themselves into something else over the long term.”
Keeping valued employees familiar with the workings of the business or industry might also pay off for employers looking to automate parts of the IT department.
“You need humans to create competitive processes – you can find software that would increase the effectiveness of the process – but you need humans drafting, maintaining and updating the business processes,” says Rich Ptak, a principal analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates.
Ptak says companies looking to implement a dynamic data center that can respond automatically to changing business requirements will want to incorporate automation technology alongside strategic staff members in their deployment. “Automation will at first free up IT folks from repetitive and predictable tasks like monitoring and enable them to focus on business-oriented tasks such as rolling out new revenue-generating services,” he says.
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W. Kevin Colwell, development manager at Capital District Physicians’ Health Plan in Albany, N.Y., says automation lets his staff work more flexibly and tackle broader tasks than in the past. With software monitoring server health and status, a systems administrator can spread his wings to explore more advanced IT duties such as provisioning new servers to support business applications.
Colwell uses Remedy software to automatically track changes and determine when human involvement is required, doing the job formerly done by two or three technicians. While automation could eliminate entry-level positions, Colwell says he doesn’t believe the technology overall can be seen as a threat to the IT organization. He says automation technology – and the IT department as keepers of such – will represent a more critical role to the business going forward.
IT management often saw automation as a means to increase productivity, but Colwell says current and future IT managers will realize the technology’s benefits in terms of process and business best practices. For his organization, healthcare regulations such as HIPAA forced the adoption of consistent best practices and processes.
“You need people to determine the way to approach processes in their organization; then automation helps prevent staff from straying from those processes,” he says.
