The Coming Management Shakeup

This morning I was reading a series of on-line articles based on the May 5, 2008 Wall Street Journal Article “New Breed of Business Gurus Rises”. In Gary Hamel’s (now considered the most influential person in business) new book "The Future of Management" he says; The need for large, expensive & highly trained information technology departments will have disappeared because reliable, robust & highly configurable solutions will be available via the Internet. I came up with my own comparison last week The companies that make DVD players and disks don’t make the content. But right now IT departments produce the medium and the content. I find his insight amazing. Few large technology companies, other than Google, are concentrating on this type of future. This must really be hard for companies like IBM, as they must continue to supply software to IT departments, who do not plan to give up any power. As I write this I am noticing that the last update from Microsoft broke spell check in Word. Good thing I have access to an on-line Yahoo spell checker. Though Yahoo does not recognize the word Google. So as IT loses power who gains it. Given that corporate level management is already overwhelmed I expect those close to production could see more work headed their way and eventually funding and responsibility. This could be a messy transition. For example I wrote this blog in Word even though I now notice that the Google interface has spell check. I wrote an online database application last year, but not until this Spring did I finally find the functionality superior enough to stop using Microsoft Access. I think IT departments will see early adopters leave quickly and they may be surprised to find they do not have a complete following of late adopters.