Death Of The IT Department

(Via Silicon.com) Two-thirds of CIOs believe the corporate IT department will not exist in its current form by 2010. Excerpts from various shades of opininons from the CIO Jury user panel:
Outsourcing, offshoring and increasing control of IT being handed to business units will lead to the death of the IT department as we know it today, and two-thirds of the 12 CIOs said 'no' with the other third saying 'yes' when asked if there will still be an internal corporate IT department in its current form by 2010.
Those who said the IT department may not exist say:
- IT will be increasingly handed to large-scale service providers as it becomes commercially and strategically attractive.
- The role of the IT team will be more focused on exploiting technologies for business benefit rather than mainly running them.
- There will be greater use of partnering and 'open-sourcing', more fusion of shared services, more effective use of collaboration tools and technologies, and a much smaller more focused unit concentrated on differentiation.

Those who expect the IT department to continue to exist are more vocal:
- The increasing business benefit focus on IT will lead to a blurring of the boundaries and a hybrid model - but not the death of the IT department.
- IT departments must and will evolve into hybrid functions with a mix of commercial and technical expertise. As infrastructures become more stable and scalable, the raison d'etre of the IT Dept will be to become centres of innovation and integration supporting the rapid assembly of new products and services.
- IT departments will become increasingly integrated with the business as part of departments such as marketing and finance, overall IT strategy and back-end infrastructure will remain with tactical teams deployed in various departments.
- There will be changes and more outsourcing of IT departments but companies will need to maintain a minimum internal core competence because data - and its processing, dissemination and protection - is a primary business asset.
It is hard to point to any single organizational model for IT departments even today. All will change to some degree, some models may disappear, technologies will certainly develop - but information management, delivery processes, integration of suppliers will be needed. The IT department will die when software and hardware and services and suppliers work together first time and every time out of the box.