More Power to Everyone
Administrators and end users are both gaining power from Windows Server 2003. How will that change their relationship?
by John Zipperer
Posted December 5, 2003
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John Zipperer
Executive Editor |
For two decades, political writers have been throwing around an overused term—empowerment—to describe ways to redistribute power within a society. In political terms, it's something of a zero-sum game: When someone gains power, someone else has to lose that same amount of power. For many years, people probably thought the same was true for the distribution of power and capabilities of the IT system, but that is proving to be wrong.
And that's good. What we are seeing in IT today is an exciting development that will likely affect corporate culture in organizations in unforeseen ways. Microsoft and other vendors are delivering to administrators much-less-complicated management tools, as well as the über-management tools that mean having to juggle fewer management consoles to handle multiple systems. This is combined with a growth in the overall capabilities those administrators have at their fingertips.
You would expect that, though, wouldn't you? But end users are also getting more capabilities, more control over their desktop experience, and more ability to manipulate data in business intelligence, collaboration, and other applications. That's where you run up against the traditional zero-sum assumptions that if the end users gain more abilities then IT staffers must resent the loss of those responsibilities.
There is the obvious worry among some IT workers who might fear (with justification, if recent history is any guide) that the simplification and centralization of management capabilities and the transfer of some data-access capabilities to end users will result in the loss of IT jobs, especially at the lower end of the scale. Much of the interest within organizations for doing this has been driven by the need for drastic cost cutting in the past couple of years, and when organizations are under severe financial strain, saving money becomes an overriding concern. But job security aside, the types of abilities that have been devolved to end users are the tasks that IT workers likely are happy to give up. No one likes being the organizational bottleneck in accessing or searching database information, and explaining how to connect your VPN to the network is not the most efficient use of time for relatively high-paid IT workers.
The economy is improving (to what degree and in what form is a topic for you to discuss over a drink at the local bar), but it's unlikely that there's a business leader alive who's going to look at his or her organization and say, "Let's strip end users of their new-found powers and hire more IT staff to recentralize IT authority."
In this month's case study, you'll see this devolution and concomitant growth of power in action at a company that wanted to make life easier for end users and system administrators. For that company, the issue was improved service and decreased costs and management time.
The place to keep your eyes focused, however, is on where the changing relationship between end users and administrators is heading. How will end users' expectations of what information technology can deliver to them change? How will it change the composition of teams dedicated to planning or implementing future IT projects? How will it change the corporate pecking order?
Stay tuned. A lot will continue to happen here. This two-track empowerment of end users and administrators has a lot of room to develop.
Talkback
How is the shifting of responsibilities and capabilities within the Windows Server System affecting your job? Let us know at .
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