Only a decade ago an IT professional likely was the master of one or two large scale systems. Perhaps they owned the Tandem, maybe they were an Informix DBA, or perhaps managed several applications running on the Big Iron; but typically they were specialists in their daily life. Today though, the scene has changed. We see application developers who are, by necessity, quite good on the data side, and passable network administrators; flash designers who become PHP wizards to make their games and applications more collaborative; we even find it moving in the opposite direction, developers who begin to theme their applications like true artists.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not making a case for the jack-of-all-trades employee, nor am I saying that you don’t need a great artist, DBA or network administrator on staff; but there is a lot of convergence at this level. With today’s software becoming net-centric, we are seeing classic IT computer technicians becoming incredibly net-savvy. Your COBOL developers are learning Microsoft .Net development as the applications they write are moved from the server to the desktop and then to the cloud on the Internet.

I think this is a good thing. New, fresh ideas are pouring into corporate IT departments and waking us up to new possibilities. Young IT professionals who are just beginning their careers have been on the net since before high school. They grew up with Amazon and broadband at home. College was different for them; it meant instant messages, Google, MySpace, and Facebook; it meant laptops and wifi; it meant always being connected. All of these things shaped their view of technology, and now it is shaping our view of IT as well. These new techies just don’t accept that we should maintain the status quo of linear one-way applications; they are trying to make their professional world as seamless as the Internet they grew up on.

I think of this time in our industry as a renaissance for a few reasons. We are coming out of what some may consider the dark ages of linear applications that had closed, one-way systems. We lived in a world where information went into the system, and then you had to get information from that one, lone tool. Barbaric I know. True, it is still that way in some places, but gradually, bit by bit, we are destroying the idea of disparate databases for every application and community in the corporation.

Today, thanks to open standards and a new era of interoperability, we have shared information and which also means the pipes* are able to flow in ways never seen before. Even Microsoft is now opening their documents and giving us a decent online version of their Office suite for sharing those documents. My one question for the Redmond giant is this: why do you still make us edit documents in Office on our computer? Silly I think.

At any rate, I say we embrace and enjoy this renaissance. We need to foster and nurture it with wise decisions, patronage and offering protection as changes are made. Mistakes will be made along the way, but more good will come than bad. We need to help these new artists as they reshape and re-imagine the IT-scape, but the future is not just out there, it is here now.

Matt

* Pipes and plumbing in the IT world is an analogy that Scott uses to great effect in his slides during his speaking and presentations.