Nicholas Carr, the author of Does IT Matter?, has a new book out and it’s one with a thesis that should matter a lot to business analysts.

In The Big Switch, he argues that the role of IT in business is set to change dramatically in the next few years:

What I actually argue in The Big Switch, in the context of a description of the history of corporate IT and the recent rise of the Internet as a shared computing grid, is that the traditional identity of IT departments, as the builders and maintainers of private computing systems, is going to change – steadily and, I think, fundamentally – as companies draw on the grid to fulfill more and more of their computing requirements.

If we look at the end game – a decade or two down the road for big companies; sooner for smaller ones – it’s hard to imagine that the ‘IT department’ as we’ve come to know it will continue to exist. Many of the information-management and process-design skills currently housed in IT departments will continue to be of great value to companies, of course, but they will likely have been absorbed into business units and other departments instead of being isolated in a technically focused corporate function. Most of the purely technical jobs will have shifted from the users to the suppliers.

I believe this is largely correct, although it may happen less quickly and easily than Carr assumes. While there will always be a need for a certain amount of custom software, organizations are increasingly turning to both outsourced service providers and to “cloud computing”, where data is stored on remote servers and accessed through the internet. I believe that this trend will increase the reliance of organizations on their business analysts. Now, we’re likely to see some changes in our traditional role, as we will spend much less time writing requirements with the expectation that they will be implemented exactly, and much more time understanding the business need, developing business cases, working on requirements which will be used to identify the services we need, choose between competing solutions, and find the most cost-effective way to implement the unique needs of an organization with a pre-built application.

In other words, expect to spend a lot more time performing Enterprise Analysis and Solution Assessment and Validation.