What Does the Future Hold for IT?

by Susan Cramm | 4:12 PM April 28, 2010

Nobody knows how technology will be managed or consumed in 5, 10, or 15 years, but we do know that
change is coming.
A recent report from the Corporate Executive Board provided a bold and provocative view of the future of IT
based on the premise that technology will be consumed as part of the business. Here are some of the
highlights:
What got us here isnt going to get us there. In spite of valiant and tireless efforts on the part of
everyone involved, the current IT organizational model falls short in delivering the capability required by
the business (less than 25% of business leaders rated their organizations IT function effective and this
hasnt changed in the last ve years.)
The source of IT-enabled value is shifting. More than half the opportunities for IT enablement are at
the customer interface or involve business intelligence or collaboration (versus process automation.)
These activities are unstructured and dynamic where players make decisions and redene processes
based on the situations at-hand, experience, and available information. Business intelligence,
collaboration, and advanced implementations of business process management arent applications as
much as they are toolsets.
The authority and responsibility for IT-enabled business outcomes needs to be aligned. The CIOs
dilemma, as illustrated by Abbie Lundberg in this slideshow, is the challenge of promoting innovation while
increasing efciency. IT is in the untenable position of being held responsible for this even though their
business partners control the decisions that impact their ability to do so. In addition, tech-friendly
professionals are entering the workforce with increased expectations for what technology can do and the
speed in which it should be delivered. Unlike their predecessors, this generation will not stand quietly,
waiting in governance lines for their share of the IT pie. They need to be tooled-up and smartened-up in
what makes IT matter within the enterprise. And they need to be held responsible for following the rules
and realizing value as they make IT-enabled change.
IT governance is really business governance. In many organizations, IT has led the way in
implementing governance over critical decisions related to strategy, business architecture, investments,
change, programs, risk and sourcing. Over time, organizations have realized that decisions in these areas
need to be coordinated across the enterprise and have elevated and consolidated these activities outside
and above IT.
This isnt your grandmothers technology. Technologies for collaboration, business intelligence, and
customer interface all require experimentation and iteration and a hands-on relationship between workers
and their technology. Increasingly, the technology necessary to assemble, deploy and operate technology
will be provisioned by external providers freeing up internal IT resources to focus on the meaty issues of
coaching users on how to exploit the technology and ensure horizontal integration, security, continuity, and
performance across the extended enterprise.
I wrote my views on the future of IT a couple of years ago and this is the rst report that I have seen that has
made me pause and think deeper about the subject. This should be mandatory reading for any leader with
one caveat.
The report portrays a relatively marginal role for the organization currently known as IT (fewer than 25% of
the employees currently within IT will remain, internal roles will shift from being technology providers to
technology brokers and roles remaining in the IT function will organize around build and run.) Absent from
discussion is the exciting role that exists for forward-thinking IT leaders who can help bring this future
forward. The business services function envisioned in this report will have a much larger, and more inuential
remit than IT holds today. In addition, IT leaders who are business-smart will be in high demand to help the
rest of the business prepare and navigate through this transition and lead the increasingly IT-enabled
business.
What are your views of the future of corporate IT?