I've noticed in the IT industry is that while many things are being automated, a lot of IT work is being shifted. What do I mean by shifted? Besides the obviou

I've noticed in the IT industry is that while many things are being automated, a lot of IT work is being shifted. What do I mean by shifted? Besides the obvious "cloud" and on demand resources, you also have the rise of "self service IT". This puts the burden of providing IT support on the user. Amazon doesn't host your web servers, they just let you push the button to make a server. Now the server is your problem. With enterprise IT, they don't want to staff support so they make FAQs and Knowledge Bases for people to search through. Nevermind that this puts burden on the IT group to document all of this and keep it up to date. So what I think is going to happen over the next 5-10 years is the continuing growth of speciality providers for services, in an effort to shift from an internal IT cost to an external IT cost. In some ways this will allow technology to grow quickly, because these companies will be experts at their problem domain and need innovative solutions for their problems. Over the longer term (10+), you might see the pendulum swing the other way in IT. Things will be brought in house again to maintain control and solve business specific problems that the outside providers don't address because they're generic providers. Every year in IT, the IT people will be asked to do more with fewer resources. So of course things are being automated and will need to be automated. If you're in charge of creating this automation, make sure you don't have any unnecessary human glue. I've seen "automated" processes that would absolutely die without enough human input. These don't scale, as you have another 50% more machines dumped on top of you without additional headcount. At no point will the human element of automation go away -- you'll just need the skills to maintain and improve the automation rather than the skills to do what the automation is doing.