My employer is moving to a new business model with new a business system being put into place. It will require rethinking the existing business model and processes. This is good. The end result of which will be a better company at the end of the road that will be better equiped to move forward globally.

The result of this rethinking is going to be a remaking of what the company thinks of IT staff. The plan is to recerate IT into Business Analysts that can relate to businesses, analyze business processes, document necessary process changes, write specifications to implement those changes and generate testing plans. The actual coding effort is being outsourced, for the most part, to a low cost providers. The result will be a group of technologists that fly at 20 to 30 thousand feet and talk business speak with the business customers. For my company, that is a paradigm shift for IT.

This model is the future for my company. It creates a more challenging position for sure, more valuable positions from the company's perspective, it does provide a better implementation of technology for the company, and, as you state, all actors make a significant contribution. The difference in this reality and what your article describes is that the actual coding, developer stage and up a few levels, is considered a thing of the past, better done off shore.

I fear that we are moving innovation off shore and then, as a servide oriented group of technologists, we will fall to the wayside, requiring more and more off shore consultants to tell us how to do things that we used to be able to do well ourselves.