According to this recent article in ComputerWorld:

IT staff jobs are at increasing risk -- both for contractors and in-house workers -- according to a survey of top CIOs by Goldman Sachs & Co. released last week. Global services companies will also feel the pinch because of the slowing economy.

My reaction:

According to the article, the study showed that CIOs are:

• Looking to cut resources from contracted IT staff


• Not looking to start or fund “discretionary IT projects”


• Looking for solutions with a “high and fast ROI.”


• See the “greatest potential for cost reduction in IT in the area of networking equipment”


• See server virtualization and server consolidation as their top two priorities, with data center consolidation an additional priority.


• Do not see cloud computing as a priority

Let’s talk about a couple of these. First, the “high and fast ROI.”

It is notoriously difficult to prove IT’s return on investment. There is some truth to the idea that IT is a utility to big companies despite the fact that they do see it as a necessity. They don’t consider electrical power a profit generator either, but without it, the business grinds to a halt.

And unless you work in a software company, chances are that IT isn’t a “profit-generating center.” Troubling.

However, what IT can do is lower costs for the company as a whole. (Indeed, the theory of having all those newfangled computers in the first place is that it saves a fortune on cross-country pneumatic tubing and hundreds of thousands of file clerks sitting on typewriters. Not to mention all the wite-out you’d need). The trick is having a way to prove that you’re lowering costs and to quantify exactly which costs you’re lowering. For that, you need a way to baseline performance and a way to determine what the effect of each IT project and change was.

Additionally, being able to detect and track detrimental changes to the network before people start calling into the help desk shows in a more anecdotal sense the utility and power of a well-functioning IT department.

This is especially important when you consider server consolidation – powered by virtualization, running many servers on one box decreases costs but certainly increases complexity. Being able to rapidly detect problems as they occur not only can decrease mean time to repair, but helps isolate problems. In a complex system, little problems early in the chain tend to cause big problems later on down the chain.

With server consolidation comes data center consolidation – seen as a major cost-cutting measure. But what that does is increase the amount of traffic that’s traveling along low-bandwidth WAN links instead of high-bandwidth LAN links. All things are relative – as you bring the servers closer to home, you’re also moving the users farther out. Being able to monitor end-to-end performance in these conditions – and figure out ways to improve performance on the WAN, is critical.

The one big silver lining in this is that cloud computing is not yet a priority – meaning that there’s still room for in-house IT even as belts get tightened. Focus will be, it seems, on the LAN, WAN, and DAN, er, if you are a network engineer named Dan, for example, our Dan in our IT department. (I suppose that you could worry about LAN, WAN, and BILL, or LAN, WAN, and LAURA but neither of those rhyme.)