By Barclay Rae Published on itSMF UK
We now hear regularly that we are now in the ‘retail’ phase of IT evolution (see The Quantum Age of IT ‘Charles Araujo). Essentially the idea is that IT has moved on from early entrepreneur and engineering-dominated stages, to what is now the commercial norm of supply chain and services.
Using e.g. railways as an example – most railway companies now run using a relatively small minority of engineers or technical experts (of course they do have them), but most jobs in that industry are now related to customer service, sales and marketing, contract management, finance, ticketing etc. Clearly there can be parallels drawn with IT which is now becoming more concerned with customer experience, business services and commercial management.