Chapter 1
Creating Your Twenty-First Century Workforce and Culture
There has never been a better time to be an information technology (IT) professional. That's right! While prognosticators have loudly predicted the demise of IT, I firmly believe there has never been a more exciting or auspicious time to be in this profession.
That may sound strange to some of you IT veterans out there. You may remember the good ol' days of electronic data processing when IT professionals were safe behind the glass walls, free to focus on technology, without interference from those pesky end users. Or perhaps you remember being the hero in the late 1990s, riding in on a white horse to save the world from the Y2K coding debacle. Then there were the wild, early days of the Internet, when being a techie was suddenly cool.
For those who long for any of those days, I can appreciate your disdain for my optimism. You've weathered the worst recession we've seen in our lifetime, the outsourcing that leveled many of your staffs, the questioning of IT's value and the return-on-investment scrutiny that continues today. You're now witnessing the encroachment of consumer technology into the enterprise, rampant proliferation of as-a-service computing models, virtualization of nearly everything, and the growing assumption that applications and data can and should be accessed and run from anywhere, on anything.
But still, I don't think I'm being naïve. Though the last few years have been riddled with doubt, disappointment, ...
