The tongue-twisting technical jargon and indecipherable acronyms of IT can throw even seasoned professionals momentarily off their stride, but one term guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of the IT department is "consolidation".
The first mention of the "C" word is usually enough to make IT staff nervously reach for the nearest recruitment adverts, and with good reason. It is often said that an organisation's employees are its greatest resource. Albeit a conveniently flexible one that is usually the first to be discarded in times of trouble, long before other vitally important resources like office buildings, pot plants, vending machines, desks or even ageing computer systems are offloaded.
Like it or not, this year the consolidation of IT resources is again high on the agenda for chief information officers, according to recent research by analyst firm Gartner, as the desperately hoped for increase in IT budgets has largely failed to materialise.
More organisations in 2005 will seek to slim down their operations to reduce costs in the hope that they can reapportion spending to more readily identifiable revenue-making schemes.
The idea is that a period of consolidation will pave the way for future growth. Fortunately, that consolidation appears set to focus on systems and systems management before it tapers down to its logical conclusion, and starts to decimate the human ranks of the IT department.
Networks and storage are high on the agenda, with the convergence of voice and data networks followed by virtualisation of network-attached storage (NAS) resources into smaller entities that are, supposedly, significantly easier to manage.
The management process itself is also under the cosh, and not before time. Whether this will mean a reduction in the number of chiefs as opposed to Indians is anybody's guess, with the outcome likely to vary a great deal from one organisation to the next, however.
Ahead of all that even, says Gartner, is the need to reduce real estate; in other words, shut down some offices and merge their functions into others. In the past, this sort of policy would automatically be associated with redundancies, but not any longer, say experts, who argue that the rapid spread of broadband over the past couple of years has brought big changes.
The advance of the virtual office is changing patterns of employment. It allows organisations to keep staff who would otherwise find themselves compulsorily or voluntarily out of a job because they live too far away from the nearest office.
Staff can now stay connected through a combination of virtual private network (VPN) links and IP telephony systems that effectively replicate the same communications systems available at central sites. Remote working has been available in one guise or another for some time; the key difference now is that the technology is sufficiently cost-effective and efficient to make it an attractive option for employers in the drive to reduce operating expenditure.
