It is Friday, which in the Automated IT towers often means an excitable hive of happy activity. We thought we would share in that happiness by highlighting some good news for IT and Technology workers. Silicon have reported that “many IT professionals can expect to see their salary rise by around an average of £10,000 every five years.”

Now before you go cracking open the bubbly, take your time to read the research, it is better to savor good news slowly. Apparently “Techies working in project management are those likely to see the biggest jumps in earnings as they progress up the career ladder.”

Happy Birthday Cloud

So the Internet is 40 years old this month; assuming of course that you carbon date one of IT’s most seminal births back to when a few ARPANET boffins first started tinkering with their nodes.

Regardless, all IT pros agree that a lot of ‘cutting edge’ technology has become obselete during that period. Disk storage no longer means a filing system for floppies, high-speed communications are now Gigabit/s rather than Kilobit/s, and ‘the great fax machine revolution’ is something we prefer not to talk about. 40 days is a long time in IT, let alone 40 years.

But while IT continues to be dynamic and evolutionary, the repetitive manual processes that often surround it are stuck in the dark ages. IT is still exciting and surprising, but it is also a utility service; a cost-centre; a business-critical asset.

So what does the future hold for IT? With all the business pressures and expectations, is there still room for innovation? With the constant need to integrate and exploit new technological capabilities, how can IT maintain financial and operational discipline?

They say life begins at 40, so it’s worth considering operational improvements sooner rather than later. Then again they also say 40 is the new 30. In any case, it’s a numbers game…

Any super-sleuth IT professional who wants to know how much colleagues and peers get paid has a few options:

-  Scour the job ads and draw a line of best fit
-  Be best friends with a recruitment consultant (though take everything THEY say with a pinch of salt)
-  Hack into payroll/go through people’s bins

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Thanks to hangfire who pointed our attention to this press release showcasing webinars with some IT professionals who are ‘automating IT’:

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/hollywoodreporter/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20090727006022&newsLang=en

But all these guys are American! No offence meant, but wouldn’t it be great to champion some UK-based people?

If you know someone who is Automating IT and deserves to be showcased then let us know and we’ll do it!

The old adage about the typical IT department is that it gets treated like a crop of mushrooms; kept in the dark 99% of the time, except when someone opens the door and covers everyone in another pile of excrement!

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Pretty much any organization is going to have used IT to automate aspects of its business.  That’s the whole point.  The obvious ones would be the finance processes like invoicing, payroll and accounts payable; or supply chain logistics stuff where stock inventory is controlled and deliveries made as precise and ‘just in time’ as possible.  Less obvious ones would be the sales process, customer service practices and the like.  The point is that IT has successfully automated everything that businesses do; so much so that new Web 2.0 business models have since been created which are entirely based upon IT’s automating influence.

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