Chad Dickerson

All of us in IT are in the unfortunate position of having to justify our existence.

Every now and then, an ambitious technology project rolls around that requires investigation of a technology area with which you may not be familiar. You may never have deeply investigated it before, and you don't have expert knowledge to draw upon.

Every now and then, an ambitious technology project rolls around that requires investigation of a technology area with which you may not be familiar. You may never have deeply investigated it before, and you don't have expert knowledge to draw upon. Sometimes, the business environment changes and your company needs new and uncertain technology to beat the competition, or perhaps even just play catch up. In the early days of the Internet, many IT professionals were in this uncomfortable boat.

Will there still be IT jobs in the future? If IT becomes seamlessly integrated into everybody's lives, what happens to IT people? What will they do and where will they work?

I'm not necessarily the world's biggest Dilbert fan, but one Dilbert cartoon I saw recently really hits the nail on the head in describing the often tenuous relationship of IT to business in day-to-day software projects.

You need a thick skin to work in IT because some people will complain about anything. This is because IT sometimes operates in a reality distortion field, where the definition of

With pieces running in the Harvard Business Review titled

With the word Google Inc. being regularly used both as a noun and a verb around most offices these days, it's a safe bet that employees in your enterprise already appreciate the simple interface, quality search results, and overall speediness of the search engine. With the Google Search Appliance GB-1001, IT managers can now bring the power of Google into the enterprise.