IT managers can no longer cope with the demands of the job as the growing increase of converged services leaves them struggling to meet their bosses' expectations.
That's the claim of research company Forrester Research. According to a recent survey, Converged Service Delivery, IT managers are not delivering what their companies want.
Forrester vice president Thomas Mendel, organizations' IT needs will be met by telecoms companies and other service providers, while sysadmins will have to reinvent themselves as "facilitators of service delivery".
Mendel said that as businesses processes become more global, companies are looking for standard delivery of applications across the whole enterprise. "Business leaders are frustrated, they want to see end-to-end managed service levels for the global delivery of SAP. They can't work out why their IT managers can't deliver it," he said.
According to Forrester research, these managers are failing to reflect the desire of better and more flexible alignment of internal IT and telecoms services.
Mendel believes that the process of rationalization will continue, with more IT managers losing their jobs and the ones remaining being used to manage the delivery of services from operators like BT. He disagreed that this would mean a step-down for managers, "they'll be freed to do more creative tasks," he said.
He pointed out that the amount of time spent on hands-on, day-to-day troubleshooting was coming down. "For example, Mendel said, "50 percent of router problems can now be fixed remotely, there's less of a need to reboot manually."
He agreed that service contracts for telecoms companies would have to change, as companies would no longer wish to be tied into long-term deals, but he said that this is happening already.