Do Businesses Still Need to Employ IT Professionals?

IT Professionals: Necessary Evil, or Expendable Resource?

A question more and more executives are asking is whether IT professionals are resolving issues for users or creating them by toying with the system that inadvertently ensures job security. Having worked with IT professionals at various companies and firms, I can tell you I have seen the good, the incompetent, and the unethical.

Everything from technicians causing more problems than solving to IT “professionals” purposefully creating problems—be grateful I don’t mention names—at his clients expense to fuel his and his wife’s need to keep up with the Jones’s, but I digress. Not all are like this…

IT professionals like to think, like most of us, they are needed and not replaceable; news flash, we are all replaceable, no matter how much one thinks otherwise. IT professionals go out of their way to show how and why they are needed, why? They need to prove their worth as they are only viewed as a cost or expense center and not a form of revenue generation.

This is where firms such as mine come in. People that solve problems; people that are well versed in “IT” speak; people that can translate the technical jargon to plain English and filter out the bullshit. My bullshit meter is always on and not a single group of professionals like to test it more than IT professionals—retained or hired—worried about their tenure

Businesses call in firms like mine to solve problems others can’t. They contact firms like mine to monitor, review, manage, and evaluate their exiting IT staff. They call firms like mine to manage large projects and develop solutions. We are their problem solvers; their systems research analysts, their systems architects, and their project managers.

IT professionals, your rein over companies has come. With hosted services and cloud computing, you’re an aging dinosaur. Yes, you can find a job at a service provider such as the aforementioned services, but working for a company will be limited and only the select few will make it. If you’re working for a “brake-fix” shop, I highly, and I mean highly suggest looking for new employment.

Looking to get into the IT field with hopes of working at a small business? No way! Look elsewhere. Small business are familiar with 37Signals, Evernote, Dropbox, Google Mail, Google Docs, etc. No longer do they need your services nor do they need your attitude, hygiene, body odor, and general lack of social skills.

Not all is lost. Programmers are needed, arguably more so than ever. Try programming, or working as an administrator at either (a) a very large institution, or (b) a cloud/telecom/computing service provider.

Let the disgruntled comments and emails begin.

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