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The Rise of Engineered Systems

Mercedes car, broken down into components.

I changed into a new role at Oracle: I now work for the EMEA Engineered Systems Architecture Team (ESAT). We support Oracle’s EMEA Engineered Systems business by engaging with customers, enabling our field organization with trainings and through evangelization.

You can call me biased towards Engineered Systems now, but that would be like accusing a Mac fanboy of suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome, when it’s actually the other way round.

The other side of the “biased” medal really is that I have a choice of where I want to work, and one of the reasons I changed from my cozy SPARC/Solaris Technology camp to the Engineered Systems crowd is: I believe the world of IT is changing.

Let me explain.

How to Add Creativity to Your Technology Career and Save Yourself from Automation and Outsourcing

In a recent blog article about the future of IT admins, my MUCOSUG-Buddy Wolfgang wondered whether the new generation of self-managed, appliance-like systems like Oracle Exadata, Oracle Sun Storage 7000 and their friends from other vendors are making IT personnel redundant, or what kind of jobs IT people are supposed to be doing in the future.

This reminded me of Dan Pink's book "A Whole New Mind" (Amazon.com|co.uk|de, BooksOnBoard). Pink argues that today's "left-brainish" jobs are threatened by "abundance, automation and Asia" (the latter really meaning "outsourcing") and that today's knowledge workers need to learn how to better employ their "right-brain" and add creativity to their jobs, as a new competitive differentiator.

How does this relate to Technology or IT jobs?