2004 — Will be a very good year.
It’s the year when you can go to parties, say you work in IT, and have desirable would-be partners throw themselves at you. You will be ICT cool, but nobody will reincarnate that repulsive term — ‘digerati’.
Your boss the CFO or CEO and the business unit managers will respect you as they finally fully understand the value that ICT brings to their business. They will know that when things go wrong in said technology that it’s not your fault. They will ring you just to say thanks because everything worked today.
The CFO and the CEO will know that with your genius in technology selection and implementation you don’t need a bigger IT budget, but will increase it anyway. Problem staff will just leave, with a smile and a letter of apology. You will get a PA and your office furnishings will be upgraded to Vogue Living quality. Your systems administrator, or maybe even you, will enjoy set-and-forget security surety.
Vendors will under-promise, over-deliver, and at a price that will leave the CFO smiling like a pig in mud. Spammers will stop e-mailing you, and send cheques via snail-mail as compensation for the earlier mail server upgrades that their collective spamming forced upon your company. Wireless standards will be settled, storage systems will all interoperate, and the closest thing to an integration headache you suffer is trying to make both of your company cars (a BMW M3 and Mercedes SLK 32 AMG) open with just one remote locker.
If you work in IT for a government department or agency, the Minister will drop by and voluteer to take care of Microsoft patch management — nobody will tell the honourable he or she that they can’t schedule the downtime needed to ensure every Windows desktop and server in the joint is up to date with the latest service patch and update release. You will close down your helpdesk because it’s just not needed any more.
There will be a rush of “outsourcing to Australia”. A brilliant Australian software company will break though the clubbie US-controlled standard operating environments (SOEs) and dominate the world within its niche. Profits will be repatriated Downunder.
This is our last issue for 2003 — sidestep the in-laws, if need be, and have a great Christmas Day! Thanks for your support and for all the hard work by the editorial, sales and circulation teams in creating Computerworld for its 25th anniversary year.
Best wishes for 2004. We’ll be back.