Service Oriented Architecture - "I think we spend way too much on the 'A' and not enough on the 'SO.'"

There is a really neat article in today's CIO.com. The article describes some of the trends in IT over the next few years, and the general argument from Gartner points to a vision of an IT department that is customer focused.

I showed this cartoon to my IT team and described the "traditional" view of IT - this is how a lot of customers see us as IT professionals:



For my entire career, I've been in Information Technology but have never really been a technologist. I can certainly code, architect solutions, but if you pressured me to come up with a fast algorithm I'd be hard pressed to do so. I've never worked with mainframes, punch cards, assembler, or hardware other than my PC.

What I do know how to do and what is increasingly valued in the new vision of Information Technology is to come up with creative technology solutions and I can span from end to end of the technology development life cycle. I can sell solutions, evangelize change and think strategically about a problem and create an applied technology solution.

When I meet young programmers, I actively encourage this type of thinking because as the article points out, this is really the differentiators in my line of business. If you want to make yourself outsourcable, concentrate on algorithms, data, and optimization of technology solutions. If you want to stop being outsourced, start thinking about the solution, the customer and how you can take most of your components from cheap off the components and bring them to life to solve a real business problem. That's how the modern IT department creates value - the rest will be quickly outsourced or commoditized.