As the infrastructure maintenance and PC support operations mature, an IT department must continue to innovate. Its value proposition is the packaging and distribution of meaningful services aligned with the business needs. It includes partnering and consulting with customer groups in innovative spaces like collabortion, web publishing, and self-service. A higher level information creation and distribution channel needs to be created to support rapid assembly of reusable components. If given tools, advanced user groups should be able to build communities which can meet their own lightweight application needs, filling gaps that a centralized transaction system is not meant to.
Will IT Departments Still Exist in 2010? ...
In this article from ZDNet, two-thirds of the 12 CIOs answered the question with "no" with the other third saying "yes."
Rather small sampling, and I think is primarily a provocative headline type story. On the whole I agree with the statement from Ian Cohen:
"Comments regarding the impending death of the IT Dept are premature and exaggerated. 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 centers of innovation and integration supporting the rapid assembly of new products and services."
If IT fails to invest in building a flexible high level information bus, business units will continue to use the tools we have given them (office suites on PC's, and email) to concoct strange ad-hoc workflow systems to manage internal processes. Or they will seek ASP's and or off the shelf products to meet specific needs hampering the ability to "plug in" to the information bus once they need to share data with another department or system. IT needs to manage these relationships melding a mix of commercial applications, web hosted ASPs, and internally developed bridging interfaces and applications toward a adaptive service oriented architecture.
IT is not about the best technology, its about connecting the dots.
The dots are the data and the people; the information and knowledge produced and consumed by each person and function in the organization; the lifeblood of the organization. The lines between the dots represent the information flow between the dots; the veins for the lifeblood; the information bus. Where's the magic map? Why does it need to be magic? Because the lines change all the time. This is why we need an agile bus, that can adapt to the changing priorities and organic workgroups within the organization, and the extended constituent base. The bus needs to work 100% of the time, it needs to work securely over the Internet. For every new technology, every new widget project etc.... we need to be asking the question: "Does this move us closer to building the information bus? Will this plug into the bus?". Even if we don't have the bus defined yet, we can still plan for it. Any choice thats adaptable, agile, modular, promotes reuse and integration.... Not pre-defined integration per se, but the adoption of Open Standard which will allow for integration down the road. Choose open standard bricks now, and the building will be easier to build later.
Be "centers of innovation and integration supporting the rapid assembly of new products and services", or face extinction.
