In-house boffins set to change, not wither...

The Register has an interesting piece today on the much-discussed consequences to in-house I.T. staff of the increasing corporate transition to cloud computing. The central gist of this posits that in-house I.T. provision is likely to evolve to occupy a more creative and forward-thinking role, rather than playing catch-up on long-delayed server moves, trouble-shooting backup routines, asking staff if they've tried turning it on and off again (see pic above) etc...

This is an old theory, of course, and one seen by many worried IT staff as a standard fob-off-in-waiting for companies that have poor relations with their own IT department and would welcome the chance to downsize or outsource the cellar-geeks. One of these days the obvious corollary scene must come, where a hard-to-remove IT worker answers the phone on day one of a company's new contract with outsourced IT support.

All this rather begs the radical question of what in-house IT staff are supposed to be doing if they're not being a bottleneck in the grand schemes of management. Implementing the very integration that the the cloud makes possible? Using their specialist knowledge to present a range of options to Purchasing for hardware and SaaS?

What role the IT team will have in the post-Cloud world probably depends on management's vision and imagination in re-defining what a company needs from technicians when there are hardly any wires left to re-splice (except the big wire out).

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