Within the next 20 years, you’ll see over half of the information technology assets moving into the hands of commercially run service utilities. “Outsourcing” is just a name that masks a profound change in the way technology may support the majority of customers in the future. What you see is the end of the craft-guild mode and the beginning of the industrialization of information processing.
Predictor: Strassmann, Paul
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Computerworld magazine, Paul Strassman writes: ”Within the next 20 years, you’ll see over half of the information technology assets moving into the hands of commercially run service utilities. ‘Outsourcing’ is just a name that masks a profound change in the way technology may support the majority of customers in the future. What you see is the end of the craft-guild mode and the beginning of the industrialization of information processing. Corporations will be able to take their IT budget out of overhead and make it a variable cost, just as labor and materials are now a cost of production. For that they will not need a CIO, but a chief technical officer that will assure enterprise-wide systems integration, because every executive will be a chief information officer. In this way, the CIOs will have succeeded beyond their dreams, though not exactly in the form they originally visualized.”
Date of prediction: September 15, 1994
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: Employment
Name of publication: Computerworld Magazine
Title, headline, chapter name: CIOs Should Get Back to Basics
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.strassmann.com/pubs/cio-basics.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Vellucci, Amanda