Disruptive Technologies - Change

Apple's iTunes Store has surpassed Wal*Mart as the #1 source of music. The shift to digital (music, movies and books) is accelerating. Digital sources of information are growing and our use is accelerating.

What does this mean for I.T. in our support for business. More content, more movement of data, more need for good taxonomy and meta data - more bandwidth.. We already see employees and customers looking for digital information sources. In addition to our standard fare of html and pdf files they are starting to expect podcasts, webcasts and videos (do you have something on You Tube yet)?

What does this mean from the standpoint of our organizations? What does this mean from the standpoint of the application set and infrastructure that we purchase and support? It's probably good news for certain suppliers - storage supplier(s) that we have arrangements with, that have good tools and the capability to scale. Software suppliers, database suppliers that can make the management of that data more efficient.

Organizationally, what are we doing to optimize our ability to handle the growth in storage requirements, changes in tool sets, ability to manage new forms of data? Dedicated storage staff, projects to meet these new business requirements, staff targeted at new areas of growth? and doing it all within static or shrinking budgets?

This is an opportunity to give key staff members a chance at something new. It's, perhaps, an opportunity to reorganize and move non-performing members of our organizations out of the business. It's an opportunity to change our staff composition to meet business requirements.