Seems that the more info that pops up on the Services Oriented Architecture, the clearer the evidence becomes that IT generally may be in decline. The below article is from last weeks Partnerworld conf (IBM) in Las Vegas.

I have extracted some comments that get to the heart of the matter. As far
as I can see, SOA will allow increasing chunks of IT to be farmed off to third world countries & IT as we knew it will shrink. The skill required in IBM's so called 'on-demand' world, will be for assembling services (hosted) into solutions & turning on the tap to the amount of capacity needed.

This doesn't seem to bode well for IT shop as they have been.

Doug Marker

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[link|http://www.mcpressonline.com/mc/.6ae9a94f!more=1#more|http://www.mcpresson...9a94f!more=1#more]


Change for Local IT
For local IT, On Demand is the harbinger of radical change. Most small-to-medium business enterprises cannot afford the levels of investment in hardware and software services that larger enterprises are contracting today. So, in an interesting turnabout, these organizations are using the global Internet infrastructure--the infrastructure that allows a knowledge worker to work from nearly any place on earth--to create relationships with outsourcing offshore organizations that replace basic IT and programming services themselves. Their rates are less expensive than local consulting rates, and there are often tax advantages to shipping these jobs out of the country.

This change by many smaller organizations has meant fewer in-house development jobs, fewer IT support positions, fewer consulting contracts for local consultants, and the scaling down of the kinds of services that in-house IT provides. Sometimes, it causes the offshore outsourcing of the entire IT department itself, though no U.S. statistics are currently available to document this trend.
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