The New Conventional IT Wisdom

It is perhaps a commentary on how much things have changed that the U.K.-based research group Butler Group can put out a new research report that confirms what the consensus is.

Butler Group says organizations are moving from traditional hierarchies based on command and control to looser structures featuring collaboration and team work, with a fundamental shift from one-to-one to many-to-many communication.

Communications service providers typically worry more about access line shrinkage, margins on minutes of use and adoption of new services, than about changes in user communication modes. But Butler Group's point about many-to-many communication is key.

It implies a growing shift to "broadcast" modes of communication such as blogs, Twitter-style streaming and social networking mechanisms.

Organizations also are beginning to expand past their traditional boundaries found in the past, which is driving the need for IP infrastructure.

There is a requirement for greater location independence, with remote working becoming more popular and many employees no longer remaining in one place for any great length of time, the research group says.

"It is becoming apparent that the existing separate silo-ed infrastructures are no longer the answer," Butler Group says.

"A services-based approach is best suited to this environment," Butler Group says.

That means Web services, says Mark Blowers, Butler Group director.

"Moving away from proprietary solutions for voice and data to a horizontal communications architecture will enable the communications environment to be broken down into separate layers, making use of industry standards to integrate the hardware, common services, and administration elements," he says.

All of that shows what the new consensus is. Web services, software as a service, open networks, remote and cross-boundary communications. Most significant of all, from a service provider perspective, is the move to "many-to-many" communications. That could be as significant as the shift from wired to wireless communications.