By all accounts Peter Cochrane’s presentation at this weeks CIO Forum has ruffled a few feathers in the IT establishment. Peter I think made an excellent point calling on the IT industry not to ignore the next generation of IT literate staff, but instead, start to adopt their culture of independence and self reliance.
The culture of the IT literate “young” is not actually to do with a specific generation, I believe it is more to do with attitude and skills. I have always attempted to be my own personal IT dept, not relying on any central IT function because, more often than not, in the past IS was located in a remote location and I had to fend for myself. This has brought the benefit of independence and control over the tools of my trade.
Peter’s point is that the IT literature workforce actually want this level of control and independence, and will reject the overly controlling traditional IT dept. Such depts need to adapt following perhaps the example of BP who are testing a model where there is no corporate network as such.. instead employees connect their own managed and purchased (with company money) laptops to secure corporate servers across the internet.
OK… this sounds rather far fetched ? but would you now ever think of sending a typist a hand written memo for them to type rather than type it yourself ?
In the same way the wider IT industry needs to adapt to a new generation of IT literate employees so must the GIS industry adapt to a generation of Geo-Hackers who rather than use expense and complex traditional GIS tools and gone off and developed their own open-source tools.
After-all last week at least twice as many people attended the FOSS4G (free and open source) conference than the AGI conference.
Written and submitted from the 20:12 Clapham Junction – Southampton train, South of Basingstoke, using my Vodafone 3G network card – EVENTUALLY-!!!.
While my point is strcitly true, as this 
