fyi Data Center Gains May Imperil Jobs

All:

Pointer to article: http://www.computerworld.com/databasetopics/data/datacenter/story/0,10801,98048,00.html

Kobielus kommentary:
This is no surprise. Actually, it’s a bit on the conservative side, as estimates go. If autonomic computing succeeds in its objectives, we should see IT operations labor-force reductions in excess of 90 percent over the next (human) generation. After all, isn’t “lights-out” automation of data centers what enterprises and service providers have been striving for since the dawn of computing?

Don’t think of it as “imperiling” jobs. Rather, think of it as just a long-term, inexorable trend toward outsourcing tedious human functions to machines. Maybe this is the utopian in me speaking, but I don’t think human beings (net-net) are disadvantaged in their careers by this trend. People who want to make their careers in IT (long term) will migrate away from operational functions to the growing, creative jobs, such as product management, application development, and e-commerce.

Oh, and on a slight tangent, it seems to me that the very notion of a data “center” is becoming a bit quaint, due to the growth of grid computing. In grid environments (think of them as the next generation of dynamic clustering), distributed CPU, storage, and other hardware and software resources get served from everywhere in a virtual application infrastructure (from servers, desktops, and other nodes), with less “big iron” anchoring the enterprise mothership. No center to the cosmos, but, rather, a much more capacious federation of galaxies serving light and matter to hungry life forms who know how to harvest it all.

It all.

Jim