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We're entering the decade of the developer

Takeaway: IT professionals were the heroes of recent decades when they helped enable big productivity gains. The next decade will have a new set of heroes: Developers. Learn why.

The major productivity gains of late 1990s and early 2000s were powered by the spread of information technology throughout organizations of all sizes. And it made IT professionals invaluable. However, the technology world remains in the midst of a relentless transformation and the changes sweeping the industry over the next decade will make developers, not IT pros, the new superstars.

We shouldn’t forget that the innovations we now take for granted have streamlined business communications and commerce in big way. I’m talking about PCs on every desk, computer networks for file and printer sharing, email, shared calendars, and ultimately the Web . These innovations gave a turbo boost to existing companies and spawned the rise of nimble new companies that were able to run circles around the incumbents in many industries.

These 1990s innovations made nearly all organizations deeply dependent on new technologies and they hired IT professionals in droves in order to troubleshoot problems, train employees how to use the new digital tools, and to “keep the world running,” as it were.

But that revolution is over. The technologies are deployed. The users are trained. The data centers are built. In recent years, no new IT innovations have arisen that can transform businesses the way corporate networks or email groupware or the Web did a decade ago. Nearly everything IT is doing now is tweaking and incremental upgrades to existing technologies.

Worse, the new tech trends that are arising often adapt and iterate faster than traditional IT departments can handle. Take Web applications and smartphones for example. The product and upgrade life cycles are so short that IT’s time-tested procedures (test, harden, and deploy) leave IT in a position of rolling out stuff that is already outdated by the time they rubber-stamp it for employee use.

That’s why many employees have started using their own laptops, smartphones, and Web apps to get work done — sometimes clandestinely — and it’s why many companies have reduced the size of their IT departments. Some, such as author Nicholas Carr, have even predicted the demise of IT altogether.

TechRepublic recently asked its CIO Jury to weigh in on the future of the IT department and the verdict was mixed, with half thinking IT will continue to shrink and the other half thinking all boats will rise as technology becomes even more embedded in modern organizations.

I tend to side with the shrinkers, with the exception of a few industries such as health care that have traditionally lagged in IT innovation and are now quickly catching up (a phenomenon borne out in the comments from the CIO Jury poll). But, that won’t last forever.

Why? Many computer products have become so cheap that it’s often easier to replace than to repair. Plus, IT services have become highly commoditized. There are plenty of technicians and administrators to fill up the labor pool (unlike the IT labor shortage a decade ago), and there are plenty of consultants who can fill in the gaps when needed. The really good IT professionals will still cost you a pretty penny, but they’re worth it because they can make your organization more efficient or innovative, or both.

The other factor is expectations. Now that workers have been using this stuff for over a decade, they just expect it to work. There’s less tolerance than ever for downtime or buggy systems, especially when companies have outsourced it to service providers who promise best-of-breed experts on the clock 24/7/365. But, even when companies have an expensive in-house IT department that has been hired to make everything run like clockwork, they don’t tolerate interruptions.

IT is now a utility. And increasingly, it’s just a utility that gets you to your apps

Applications have always been king — to an extent. It was apps that decided the winner of the PC wars of the 1980s, empowering IBM and then Microsoft to victories over Apple.

But today’s app environment is different. It’s faster. It’s more incremental. It’s multi-platform. It’s more device-agnostic.  And it’s shifting more of the power in the tech industry away from those who deploy and support apps to those who build them. Oh, and did I mention that it’s easier to get started, so there’s also a lot more competition?

This new app model began in smartphones, with the App Store for Apple’s mobile OS, but it has spread to other mobile platforms such as Android and more recently to netbooks and tablets as well. And it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to desktop, Web, and enterprise apps, which will each get their own nuanced versions of app stores.

It will be especially interesting to see how well really big software packages can adapt and get more modular, and possibly embrace open standards so that data can flow more easily between best-of-breed apps and modules. But, however it plays out, the momentum behind this app model is too great for it not to affect traditional software packages and software implementation methods.

It’s a simple equation. When there’s less tech support, there’s a lot more emphasis on apps that just work. And the new app model forces developers to make apps that can deliver immediate value to users, otherwise they’ll get passed over for the next app.

This breeds a survival-of-the-fittest environment for developers, but make no mistake, there’s never been a better time to be a developer.

In this environment, developers have tremendous opportunities for independence and creativity. Individual developers and small teams of developers (sometimes in concert with designers and project managers) can now build mini empires for themselves, thanks to the micropayment systems that allow one developer with a PayPal account to have virtually all of the infrastructure needed to start a consulting business.

Industrious developers can even work for a big company or an app development team as a day job and then moonlight as an independent developer with a few of his or her own apps that can potentially generate residual income. Meanwhile, experienced app developers can freelance for multiple clients and build a small consultancy by helping businesses of all sizes get into the app game.

For these developers, location matters less than ever, too. A developer with email, a Skype account, and a half-decent Web portfolio can typically find pretty good work, even from clients in remote locations. Plus, the tools for team collaboration over the Web are getting better all the time and will continue to break down geographic barriers.

The demand for developers is increasing because everyone wants an app now — from Target to Allstate to Joe’s Garage down the street. They started with mobile but we should expect this to spread to tablets, desktop widgets, and eventually TVs (once platforms like Android and iOS get embedded in the living room experience). Having a multi-platform app strategy will become standard procedure for new companies the way having a website is today.

The sweeping changes in the tech industry will continue to have unpredictable consequences and will produce new sets of winners and losers. Traditional IT roles are not going to go away, but they will be under increased pressure and are likely to become more concentrated in service providers. At the same time, developers are about to step into the spotlight. This is going to be their decade.

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

There’s a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It’s a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salaries by getting training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candidate for a key position in a thinly-stretched job market. At the time, IT was held up as one of the professions of the future, where more and more of the best jobs would be migrating as computer-automated processes replaced manual ones.

Unfortunately, that idea of the future has disappeared, or at least morphed into something much different.

The glory days when IT pros could name their ticket evaporated when the Y2K crisis passed and then the dot com implosion happened. Suddenly, companies didn’t need as many coders on staff. Suddenly, there were a lot fewer startups buying servers and hiring sysadmins to run them.

Around the same time, there was also a general backlash against IT in corporate America. Many companies had been throwing nearly-endless amounts of money at IT projects in the belief that tech was the answer to all problems. Because IT had driven major productivity improvements during the 1990s, a lot of companies over-invested in IT and tried to take it too far too fast. As a result, there were a lot of very large, very expensive IT projects that crashed and burned.

When the recession of 2001 hit, these massively overbuilt IT departments were huge targets for budget cuts and many of them got hit hard. As the recession dragged out in 2002 and 2003, IT pros mostly told each other that they needed to ride out the storm and that things would bounce back. But, a strange thing happened. IT budgets remained flat year after year. The rebound never happened.

Fast forward to 2011. Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they’ve outsourced much of the data center altogether. These were the jobs that were at the center of the IT pro boom in 1999. Today, they haven’t totally disappeared, but there certainly isn’t a shortage of available workers or a high demand for those skill sets.

That’s because the IT environment has changed dramatically. More and more of traditional software has moved to the web, or at least to internal servers and served through a web browser. Many technophobic Baby Boomers have left the workforce and been replaced by Millennials who not only don’t need as much tech support, but often want to choose their own equipment and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity. In other words, today’s users don’t need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will argue this until they are blue in the face, but it’s true. Most workers have now been using technology for a decade or more and have become more proficient than they were a decade ago. Plus, the software itself has gotten better. It’s still horribly imperfect, but it’s better.

So where does that leave today’s IT professionals? Where will the IT jobs of the future be?

1. Consultants

Let’s face it, all but the largest enterprises would prefer to not to have any IT professionals on staff, or at least as few as possible. It’s nothing personal against geeks, it’s just that IT pros are expensive and when IT departments get too big and centralized they tend to become experts at saying, “No.” They block more progress than they enable. As a result, we’re going to see most of traditional IT administration and support functions outsourced to third-party consultants. This includes a wide range from huge multi-national consultancies to the one person consultancy who serves as the rented IT department for local SMBs. I’m also lumping in companies like IBM, HP, Amazon AWS, and Rackspace, who will rent out both data center capacity and IT professionals to help deploy, manage, and troubleshoot solutions. Many of the IT administrators and support professionals who currently work directly for corporations will transition to working for big vendors or consultancies in the future as companies switch to purchasing IT services on an as-needed basis in order to lower costs, get a higher level of expertise, and get 24/7/365 coverage.

2. Project managers

Most of the IT workers that survive and remain as employees in traditional companies will be project managers. They will not be part of a centralized IT department, but will be spread out in the various business units and departments. They will be business analysts who will help the company leaders and managers make good technology decisions. They will gather business requirements and communicate with stakeholders about the technology solutions they need, and will also be proactive in looking for new technologies that can transform the business. These project managers will also serve as the company’s point of contact with technology vendors and consultants. If you look closely, you can already see a lot of current IT managers morphing in this direction.

3. Developers

By far, the area where the largest number of IT jobs is going to move is into developer, programmer, and coder jobs. While IT used to be about managing and deploying hardware and software, it’s going to increasingly be about web-based applications that will be expected to work smoothly, be self-evident, and require very little training or intervention from tech support. The other piece of the pie will be mobile applications — both native apps and mobile web apps. As I wrote in my article, We’re entering the decade of the developer, the current changes in IT are “shifting more of the power in the tech industry away from those who deploy and support apps to those who build them.” This trend is already underway and it’s only going to accelerate over the next decade.