Gartner: 10 Predictions for 2012, IT Departments to Adapt or be Swept Aside

By David Roe (@druadh20)   Dec 1, 2011   

If you thought the people in IT moaned a lot, then you won’t be able to hear yourself think once they get through this year’s Gartner’s IT predictions. The bottom line is that IT departments will have to adapt to working in the wider enterprise rather than within a narrow IT niche, or face elimination.

Adapt or Move Out

For those who think IT departments and the people who work in them inhabit the dark side, the predictions should provide a few giggles as the primary indentified trend here is the movement in the coming years of IT begets into the hands of business managers rather than IT people.

According to Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner fellow, the primary characteristic of IT next year will be fluidity, and where that fluidity does not exist, IT departments will be replaced by business managers who see the economy of cloud computing and the value of moving their IT requirements there.

What will probably smart even more is the fact that IT itself will be largely responsible for this situation. Devices that are easier to use, combined with more intuitive software, as well as the acceleration towards cloud computing, means that IT will have less responsibility than before.

The continued trends toward consumerization and cloud computing highlight the movement of certain former IT responsibilities into the hands of others," Plummer said.

As users take more control of the devices they will use, business managers are taking more control of the budgets IT organizations have watched shift over the last few years. As the world of IT moves forward, CIOs are finding that they must coordinate their activities in a much wider scope than they once controlled. While this might be a difficult prospect for IT departments, they must now adapt or be swept aside."

Depressing if you’re in IT. Otherwise, it points to a computing future for businesses that is cheaper, quicker and more efficient.

And to add insult to injury, it looks like IT organizations are going to be held responsible when organizations are not able to extract full meaning out of their growing amount of data and when businesses miss out on key opportunities.

In fairness, this will not really be their fault, but the fault of the uncontrolled growth in the amount of information available to enterprises.

IT workers have also been producing new analytics products as fast as the information grows, but the pile just gets bigger and bigger no matter what comes online — even some of the Big Data products like the ones IBM keeps throwing out.

And there is no regulatory help charging over the top of the hill to save the day. Organizations, Gartner says, will be pretty much left to their own devices in dealing with Big Data, and what that data is used for.

All this, however, does not mean that IT people are going to be left in the lurch; it just means that their role is going to change from being strictly IT to applying IT as a coordinating force in the enterprise.

Any organization which wishes to accelerate in 2012 must establish in itself a significant discipline of coordinating distributed activities," Plummer said. "[IT] must establish relationship management as a key skill and train their people accordingly.

The reason for this is that the lack of control can only be combated through coordinative activities. The IT organization of the future must coordinate those who have the money, those who deliver the services, those who secure the data and those consumers who demand to set their own pace for use of IT."