In January of 2007, the federal government raised the national minimum wage. This was old news in some states where the minimum wage had been raised months before congress took action. No matter how you look at the increase in the cost of labor, it is going to have an impact on the business climate and on how businesses will make key decisions in 2007 and going forward.

In theory a raise in the minimum wage should be a nonevent economically. It should be a simple adjustment for inflation which the business has already adapted to. In fact, as inflation raises the cost of goods and the prices the business charges, one might expect the wages of workers to rise naturally to match that upward slope caused by inflation.

How you view the good or the bad of the minimum wave increase may depend on which side of the fence you reside, the employer side or the employee side. To the employer the rise in employee costs makes doing business more expensive and affects the bottom line. To the employee, the employer is just being competitive and paying his or her employees a salary that they can live on. In many cases, you may be on both sides of the issue if you own or operate a business but have people in your family who are trying to get by on the minimum wage.

The hardest hit businesses by this upward push in wages is small business. Enterprises that employ a large amount of unskilled, lower paid workers can see a huge jump in the cost of keeping employees because of state or federally mandated increases in employee pay. Many times small business enterprises operate on a thin margin of profit and any change to the cost structure can be a deadly hit to their budgets. Moreover, since the small business model is intensely competitive, there is little room to raise prices to clients or customers without risking losing business to a larger competitor who can absorb the minimum wage increase without increasing prices.

These concerns are part of the reason that from a governmental stand point, congress is slow to increase the minimum wage. There is already a tremendous resentment in the population for businesses that are relocating their production or support facilities over seas to take advantage of low paid workers to keep their bottom line on track. You have to know that employee costs are a big issue when a business is willing to relocate much of their operation to a foreign country and incur all of those costs just to tap an employee base that will work below the minimum wage.

From the worker perspective, it’s hard to understand how this trend to take low paid jobs out of the country can be changed. We are slow to stop businesses from taking actions they need to take to compete in the markets which is why passing legislation to stop the exporting of jobs is not a popular idea. While it might help the plight of the worker in this country, it goes contrary to our priority on letting the free market and capitalism play out. Sadly, when the free market does reign, sometimes good people get dealt out of the program.

The best way for American workers to combat competition from unskilled workers overseas is to stop being unskilled. By taking advantage of educational opportunities and gaining valuable skills, they can enter a new market where those skills will land them a good paying job that is not likely to go overseas because of the specialized skills the worker offers to employers. So the best way for government to fight the export of jobs due to high employment costs is not to artificially suppress the market to hinder free trade. The best move is to make our workers more skilled, more valuable and for workers to simply outwork their competition overseas. This is capitalism at work at its best and if that line of attack is followed, the outcome for everybody is a stronger work force, the retention of jobs in America and a stronger national economy as well.

For decades, the classic model of how a business organizes its computer services department was to establish a separate IT department with an independent management structure which may extend all the way to the executive suite. Over the years, the autonomy of that centralized IT function took on almost mythic proportions and in some cases resulted in abusive attitudes and ways of doing business that almost gave the impression that the business existed to serve the IT department rather than the other way around.

This was a particularly prevalent model when all business computer processing was done by a large centralized mainframe computer, usually made by IBM. These mega computers are and were expensive and complicated to program and operate which dictated that to be successful, a business had to keep on staff a small army of computer specialists, many of whom seemed to speak an entirely different language and come from a different culture than those in the rest of the business.

This was a natural and necessary business paradigm under the circumstances when “big iron” ruled the IT community. However, the last several decades have seen changes to how IT gets its business done. First was the introduction of smaller, powerful systems driven by operating systems like UNIX that were capable of great efficiencies that challenged the supremacy of the mainframe in business.

The movement toward network computing which was a natural business evolution to facilitate greater data access and to build stronger communications between spread out departments in the business world further eroded the need for one centralized powerful computer operated by a select few who spoke a cryptic language. Network computing started the process of democratizing computing power in the business world. With the new dominance of the internet and the need to take the business paradigm into cyberspace, the business model of decentralized data processing has taken on new meaning and importance.

In many businesses, the final stage of IT decentralization has begun to become a reality. By locating centers of operations and development authority and responsibility directly at the department level, the efficiencies of IT decentralization have become possible at every level of the business.

This trend in locating department specific applications along with the computing resources to support them to the department level is a significant change to the business culture. Not only do the departments who benefit from those applications take ownership over the operation of those computing systems, programming and development resources will be become part of the department structure as well.

For example, if the HR department has a suite of applications that are used to tracking payroll, benefits, etc., that application will be placed completely under the authority of HR. As such, areas of authority that were formerly the sole responsibility of IT such as systems analysis, development, programming and computer operations will become part of the HR management structure. As a result, each department develops an ability to converse in IT terminologies which results in a higher IT awareness across the business that is healthy for long-term analysis of needs and resources to meet those needs.

This is not to say that new problems and challenges do not come along with the decentralization of IT. Some IT issues must be addressed at a global level because they impact the business as a whole. So there is still need for a CIO and some high level IT controls to which each of the departmentalized systems must be accountable.

Further, the issue of systems integration and finding synergies between systems to maximize the efficiency of systems becomes more difficult when each department operates its own IT operation. If each department owns and operates its own hardware and network, communications across the business are challenged and there is a higher chance that underutilization of systems will be a result. Quality control at the systems administration level is more difficult because systems administrators may be answerable only to the department level more so than to the business in general.

These organizational issues must be resolved at a high level so the transition from a centralized to decentralized way of doing business can be successful. But the rewards of putting computing power at the department level outweigh the risks of failure and justify the effort that will go with such a large change to the corporate culture.