Tech pros need to rethink job roles

Information technology professionals are at risk of becoming extinct like the dinosaurs, according to a posting on the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog.

The demise of IT pros is the consequence of two related trends: The average worker is becoming more tech savvy and tech companies are realizing that appealing to workers is more important that appealing to IT management.

The blog quotes Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Nucleus Research, who says that at IT departments can no longer get away with forcing workers to use complicated and difficult software.

A driver of that trend has been productivity applications such as instant messaging and collaboration software that have helped workers realize that software can be made easy.

IT managers also can't keep up with all the new promising technologies and will need to rely on workers to bring them new products. "Get out of the data center," Wettemann tells the WSJ blog. "Eat lunch with the regular people."