CNET Asia writes about Gartner’s remarks on how web services will disrupt the IT workforce in the coming years:
Between now and 2008, software code will become more modular and reusable and allow businesses to react to change faster.
According to Ian Bertram, vice president with analyst firm Gartner Asia Pacific, the tight integration of IT to business processes within a Web services framework will become the norm for most companies.
“Software code will be generated for a Web services environment. I can get a new service, and suck that code into my environment, rather than re-coding or paying for a coder,” he said.
Given the changes, today’s software houses had better look into providing software as a service to stay competitive, said Bertram. By 2006, Gartner sees that over 80 percent of business application products sold worldwide will be service-oriented.
And to make things more dire for developers, by 2008, powerful data-modeling and code-creation tools, supervised by small, one- to three-person teams of business analysts, will generate three-quarters of business software. Large programming teams working to months-long schedules will fade away.
Coders today should not be too worried about their jobs in the short term, but as changes take hold, “pieces of their job will go away,” said Bertram. Taking on board business skills will be essential for IT workers who want to stay relevant, he said.
