Enterprise IT will shrink
Transcript
[Music] hey how's it going as Keith towns her from the CTO of Weiser calm with today's CTO dose so we talked last CTO dose about agile enterprise IT can large enterprises fail fast today's conversation we're gonna take the conversations be step forward and we're gonna talk about shrinking Enterprise IT now this is a bit touchy touchy topic I worked at an enterprise IT next year 2018 will mark my 20th year in enterprise IT and I've made a fairly good living off of supporting implementing supporting enterprise
IT and talk obviously talking about technology in general so it's a bit controversial topic to say that you're gonna shrink enterprise IT however I think it's the natural progression of technology early on and the Industrial Revolution will see that there was value in creating on-premises electricity whether it's windmill generator etc the there was value and there was a competitive advantage if you could create electricity use the machinery that that electricity supported and basically out produce your competitor enterprise IT followed that same map that if you
could build your own internal systems your s AP your exchange email system systems etc you can build that you can increase productivity and beat your competitors however this has become commoditized and getting email as as simple as going to google.com and signing up for Gmail or hotmail or take your picker Outlook mail whatever it's called getting and creating custom email the which person two or three person customer company can have a full flat email system a two three person company can have a full-fledged CRM I
can go to salesforce.com get a full-featured CRM that competes easily with s ap I can get an ERP system from the likes of a similar competitor to s ap so technology becomes abstracted it becomes D marketized and yet large enterprises we continue to have huge enterprise IT shops I predict that companies like Amazon will continue to move the ball forward they started out in infrastructure as a service and then they started to get more into platform as a service than the evently software as a service
but the initial idea and any chassis talked about this a lot joint AWS reinvent this year is that the technology is there not because it's cool you know serverless databases are cool and concept but the point of their that they were created is to solve a business challenge and as you move technology such as machine learning artificial intelligence closer to the business in which business users can just take the logic similar to how we take Excel and create pivot tables and run entire businesses up until
recently my entire business was ran off of Excel until we we take that same methodology and apply it to AI and machine learning and take these large data sets that we can buy these algorithms that we can buy cut them them together and get real answers to really complex business challenges directly from companies like Amazon will see enterprises do that more more they'll start with the smaller competitors chess with an industrial revolution small competitors eventually get services from electrical services from utility that vanish that large
companies had to produce their own electricity shrug and to disappeared altogether where it had no competitive advantage to produce your own electricity unless you're one of the world's largest companies and manufacturers the same is I predict what happened with technology service providers will continue to make enterprise IT so simple that will see the headcount move from IT and into the business lines directly in which you're hiring AI specialists as part of your commercial operations versus consuming that service from a centralized I team I know this
if this is a controversial view so I want to hear back from you push back on me find me on LinkedIn Keith Townsend on LinkedIn let's have this conversation I posted this on my LinkedIn profile or on Twitter at CTO advisor uh or follow me on the web the CTO of Viacom I love to have this extended conversation with you until then we'll talk to you next CTO dose
