Gartner: Half of U.S. IT operations jobs to vanish

In an eyebrow-raising forecast, Gartner researchers said they believe that as many as 50 percent of the IT operational jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades because of improvements in data center technologies.

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Donna Scott, a Gartner analyst, said IT workers face a situation similar to that in the manufacturing field, which has lost jobs over the past several decades as automation has improved. Similarly, standardization of IT infrastructure, applications and processes will lead to productivity improvements and a major shift in skill needs, she said.

"There will be more room to automate, and that means there will be reduced labor cost," said Scott. "This is a long-term change."

Gartner calls this change "real-time infrastructure," which involves service-oriented architectures, the elimination of communications barriers and dynamic alignment of IT with business priorities. Technologies enabling the shift have less need for human intervention because they are more intelligent and can automatically provision services and self-heal.

IT operations, which encompass areas such as systems administration, incident response and change management, today account for about 55 percent of an IT department's labor cost, said Scott, who spoke at the Stamford, Conn.-based research firm's annual data center conference here in Las Vegas.

But as companies improve automation, IT operations become "more like a factory," said Scott. Demand will grow for employees who have IT architecture skills as well as those with business and customer-liaison knowledge. Project management, for instance, will rise in terms of the percentage of IT labor costs, she said.