At Interop New York last week, I gave a presentation entitled The Democratization of IT. I thought I'd clarify the content of that session, based on some of the feedback on this site. The slides are available on Bitcurrent's website, along with some (free, nonpartisan) research we've done on migrating enterprise IT to the cloud and cloud performance.

The three ages of computing

Humans have been using electronic computers for scarcely seventy years. In the first half of that time, computers were used for two main tasks: counting things (generally, the population) and throwing things at other things (artillery and space missions.)

The computers were gigantic, expensive, and prone to problems; as a result, they were the domain of specialists. Compared to computers, humans were cheap, so we did the "heavy lifting" -- staying up late to maximize their usage, carrying armfuls of punched cards, flipping switches, and coding in assembler.

From the mid-seventies on, the locus of innovation shifted. Client-server architectures and the personal computer took over. We realized that some tasks were better distributed throughout the organization, and millions of small businesses had access to tools that were previously the domain of only large companies. Playing fields were levelled.

Since the late nineties, and the advent of the Web, we've been in a third age of computing. Today, everyone is a technologist, and the computer itself has started a slow, inexorable slide into the background -- what Mark Weiser called Ubiquitous Computing, or Ubicomp, back in 1988.

First: monopoly good

A monopoly occurs when one organization controls a market. It's generally bad for competition and innovation, which is why most countries have something like the Department of Justice to investigate antitrust claims. But there are times when it makes sense to create a legal monopoly -- in particular, when a common resource needs to be created, but isn't attractive in its own rights.

The U.S. did this with the creation of AT&T, which ran a legally sanctioned monopoly in order to build out phone infrastructure. We have other methods to encourage development through exclusivity: railroad corporations were granted land rights; drug companies were given IP protection; and companies like the Hudson's Bay Corporation were given the right to exploit a region. Governments have a monopoly on road building, primarily because it's a job nobody wants.

And until recently, IT had a monopoly on computing. It was costly, complicated, and thankless. It made sense to give IT a monopoly.

Then: monopoly bad

A funny thing happens to monopolies: they tend to work themselves out of a job. In the case of AT&T, other providers wanted access to the local loop, and legislators "unbundled" services that ran over the wires, leading to the eventual breakup of AT&T. Wireless voice and wired data made the market appealing. Innovation soared.

Similarly, as the Hudson's Bay Corporation opened up the Canadian North, others wanted to play. As drug companies' patents expire, they need to find new medicines. Eventually, then, monopolies are bad, stifling innovation and creating inefficient cultures.

IT's days as a totalitarian regime are over

Today, everyone is a technologist. Few of us sleep with our email more than five feet from our heads. If you need proof of this, look no further than your keyboard:  back in the seventies, few workers even knew how to type; today, it's a basic skill. In nearly every company in a developed nation, employees walk in the door with newer technology on their hip than their employer puts on their desk.

Last week, someone asked me what the trigger for the hype around cloud computing was. I answered that it was probably Salesforce.com -- not because of the product itself, but because of how it insinuated itself into large companies. Salesforce completely bypassed the enterprise IT immune system. Sales -- arguably the least technical department in the company -- managed to replace million-dollar, multi-year CRM implementations that IT had worked hard to deploy.

It's not just SaaS, either. Look at the web analytics market. There's no good reason why this isn't a function of enterprise IT -- after all, they had the logfiles needed to extract visitor information from websites. But they were simply too slow to react, so marketing used Javascript to pass visitor information to third-party vendors like Omniture, Webtrends, and Web Side Story.

With cloud computing, this is getting even more obvious. Expense reports used to give IT a sense of security: a line of business employee couldn't possibly procure servers, bandwidth, and data center space because it would be over their departmental limit, so they were forced to go to the IT monopoly for permission -- and generally speaking, had to wait weeks or months.

That's no longer the case. A department can buy computing for $0.10 an hour on Amazon.com, paying as they go. Google App Engine is free to use, up to a point. In one session at Interop, Dan Koffler and Shlomo Swidler showed how to stand up a three-tiered SugarCRM application on Amazon; then scale the app tier vertically; then clone it into a pair of applications, adding a load-balancer; then make a copy of those systems and upgrade them, deleting the old ones; then decommission it.

It took them 40 minutes. And it cost only a few cents.

That's a big change for IT. When computing becomes too cheap to bother expensing, and when the end users -- developers, product managers, and support teams -- are building applications, IT's monopoly has been revoked. I spoke with one telco whose support team, frustrated with the slow pace of deployment by their internal team, built a ticketing system from Intuit Quickbase in a few days. By the time IT realized what was happening, 4,000 people relied on it, and IT had to catch up.

What IT does now

That doesn't mean IT goes away. It means that the CIO has a new role, much as governments have a new role in democracies. It's about governing, aggregating a set of services both inside and out, and making it easy to couple public and private infrastructure. It's about making sure your employees don't hurt themself -- think of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Trade Commission in the US: their job is to make sure that everyone's playing by the rules.

Paula Klein's writeup on my presentation was necessarily brief, and may have made it sound like I was advocating a utopia of social networks and an abandonment of centralized IT. That's not the case; but I do believe that IT needs to readjust its role in the organization in an era where consumers and employees, not companies and organizations, are the locus of innovation.

In the closing session of Interop's Enterprise Cloud Summit, I remarked that "when it comes to cloud computing, the genie is out of the bottle. Enterprises need to stop looking for a cork, and start deciding what to wish for." I think that's a pretty accurate assessment of IT in a world where everyone's a technologist, computers are cheap, and fast, agile business is the norm.