CLOUD TO SUCK UP ALL YOUR CASH: Govts around world slash IT spending Governments around the world have made plans to cut their IT spending, according to a study, although apparently they're still really keen on the "cloud" and have also shown some interest in "Big Data". A survey conducted by research firm Gartner has found that global governments will spend a total of $449.5bn on IT in 2013, a …
Where does this never ending pile of crap being spouted by companies about the cloud saving money? Ignore the off the shelf costs - You need to add in usage - Ahh there we go at least 50% more than just buying the hardware... I know of two companies which have been forced back onto owned hardware after being stung massively by this - Still the idea this saves you money keeps getting spouted by research and cloud companies...
Oh and BYOD - Good luck with that.
This is a perfect example of one of the things wrong with our chosen profession.
Gartner and their ilk are constantly stirring up the hype machine with breathless reports like this, and the executive crowd thinks they're a bunch of mad research scientists sitting in a lab dispensing their genius. They're not -- they're a bunch of whitepaper writers who package the latest fad into a palatable executive-approved format. Granted, there needs to be leading edge and stable waves of technology or nothing would ever move forward. However, it should be done in a measured, reasoned, researched way. What does the 25-year-old MBA who wrote that report know about cloud computing or BYOD beyond the thin veneer of hype?
I would personally like to see the non-technician roles of IT (systems engineering, design, architecture, etc.) morph into a licensed engineering profession. Barrier to entry, formal training program, continuing education, and most importantly accountability for screwing up. As it is right now, we rely too much on vendors' certification programs, the Gartner crowd, and countless other "vendor-sponsored" whitepaper writers for training. IT "practitioners" who screw up slink off quietly and find some other company who hasn't heard of them yet. And new grads who want to enter the field have a very hard time now that solid, challenging entry level IT work is getting tougher to find.
And for the record, BYOD if done with the right expectations isn't a bad thing. You just have to spend the time and money re-architecting systems so that even internal networks and devices are untrusted by default -- and of course, eveyone implementing BYOD has done that, right?? :-)
> Gartner and their ilk are constantly stirring up the hype machine with breathless reports like this,
A handy idea for an article would be to trawl through some 5 year-old Gartner reports and see whether their predictions bear any relation to current reality. (Or possibly having a Friday afternoon laugh at how off mark they were.)
(Won't be written by me though; I can't stand reading the current reports, never mind their old ones.)
ACM are making huge strides here, with a code of conduct, huge investment in real research and a program to develop their professional support, hopefully towards something which might resemble this in the future.
The membership is around £170 and for that you get access to a huge research library and a magazine that more closely addresses technical aspects of IT than any other industry magazine I have seen.
They outclass the BCS by a long long way, and are probably the closest we have to a genuine body of people who actually have technical skills, rather than spouting marketing waffle and charging a fortune for the reports.
Bernard Shaw springs to mind. "All professions are conspiracies against the laity."
And the cynic in me suggests codes of conduct, technical skills and support are all nice ideas until the PHBs in the CEO suite make a dubious decision. Then it becomes an eating tomorrow type decision.
The traditional method of buying ICT for governments was a clear failure. Long schedules, very high prices and full custom solutions.
Cloud initiatives in most countries are breaking that problem down. SaaS in government clouds is saving a great deal of upfront money, and getting shorter schedules to boot. Savings are as much as 60 percent over the old method.
SaaS and the cloud are making sense for government. Gartner is likely underestimating the drop that will occur as migration starts in earnest.
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