Oh my, there was a lot of bad news about IT jobs last week. First of all Computerworld published a story called, As cloud grows, IT spending flatlines and then Forrester released a report suggesting that recent IT spending was actually hurting IT jobs growth. It’s enough to make an IT pro throw up his or her hands in despair.  But perhaps BSM could be the answer. 

While it’s clear there are some disturbing trends, it doesn’t have to be all gloom and doom. Let’s explore the numbers for a moment first. IDC says public cloud computing spending is going up at a fairly dramatic rate. This corresponds with a loss in IT jobs and the easy conclusion to make is that the shift to the public cloud is costing jobs (whether true or not).

Meanwhile, the Forrester report points out that companies are spending on IT infrastructure, yet not producing the corresponding jobs you would expect to coincide with that spending. What does it all mean?

It’s hard to find firm answers, but let’s assume that some of this jobs lag is due to trends like investments in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). By their nature these machines require less maintenance, at least on their face. You can upgrade them from the back end. You don’t have to deal with users downloading viruses, but these machines require far more network monitoring to be sure you are getting decent throughput across the system — and that’s where BSM comes in.

Same goes with the cloud. As I wrote recently in Cloud Control: Staying on Top of the Hybrid Cloud, “One consideration you might want to take into account when choosing an external cloud vendor is the extent to which it provides information for your monitoring systems.” As an IT professional one your big responsibilities in the future will be in monitoring your internal and external systems.

And these are just a couple of the small examples where BSM comes in. Remember, as a system BSM provides a way to monitor the health and well-being of your entire technology infrastructure, and it lets you see the business benefits of these technologies.

As you come to understand the information moving through these systems, you can begin to see the impact of technology across the entire organization and that kind of information is valuable.

That’s why I might not be exaggerating when I say that the future of IT might be in BSM because it is going to be increasingly important for organizations moving forward to understand the entire IT infrastructure and BSM can help you do that.

Photo by gwire on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.