What will IT consulting look like in 10 years? Will it be pretty much the same but with different technologies? Will there be a radical shift in a new direction? It’s obviously hard to know these things but it is possible to make some educated guesses.
One thing is Cloud technology will be come a bigger player, in the sense that you can get run application off the web especially the basic ones, like word processing and excel. This probably means people’s data will be stored in the cloud since that will make the hassles of transferring them from one computer to the next much easier.
That leads me to wonder about the actually devices that will be used to access the data, will we still need powerful workstations? Especially if there will be no need for local storage, so in effect all you will need are basically web browsing machines.
I’m sure there will be the exceptions though, such as a complex graphics application like CAD drawing or even PC gaming is hard to imagine being run through the web. So there will always be a need for workstations, however the cost of them has been drastically going down, which means regardless of all the various browsing machines, the workstation will still be around because they are just simply cheap.
Where does that leave the IT consulting industry? Typically any change means more work for IT consultants. This can be a simple move from one location to another or any change in technology as a whole. The years to come the help needed to move to the cloud can be barrage of work.
Will it all settle down years later where anybody can just stick a dummy device with a nice display and connect to the web and more or less self support? Yes I believe this can be a reality. However I think only a slight majority will move to such a setup, the rest will still have some traditional workstations setup because newer needs will require more powerful local computing.