Are the days of the enterprise IT department numbered?

A few days ago I attended the NowForum in Sydney where Lalitha Biddulph gave a fantastic presentation in which she declared that in the not too distant future, IT departments as we know them will cease to exist.  My initial thoughts were that we will always have users wondering where the ‘Any’ key is, however if we take a deeper look, Lalitha may not be too far from the truth.  In fact there are a number of people out there who believe that the days of the IT department are numbered.  If that is indeed what the future holds, should I be retraining for a different career rather than pursuing my goal of becoming a CIO?

We have been seeing a shift around managing and maintaining IT infrastructure for a while now with both outsourced IT infrastructure and applications (aka cloud) and also outsourced IT services for operation (i.e. managed services) and maintenance tasks (break/fix support contracts).  This shift is occurring through both IT led initiatives and through unofficial business led ‘shadow IT’.   Although the traditional roles of helpdesk, network support and systems administrator will be around for a while still, they will be seen less and less within the enterprise.

In the interim, the focus of the IT department will become one of digitization and automation.  The people who are currently entering the workforce, were born into a world where there has always been a PC and we are not too far away from a time when the people entering the workforce will have grown up with smart phones.  When these people require an application for their smart phone, they don’t call up the vendor support number and ask them to install the application for them, they simply visit the respective vendor portal and request the app to be downloaded and installed.  This is the same experience that the IT department needs to deliver to its users through the digitization and automation of the IT function.

The next logical step is to provide the same digitization and automation for functions within the rest of the business, such as automating the HR on-boarding process – user account creation, assigning a desk, ordering a computer, phone and business cards, security and ID cards can all be digitized and automated.  It’s at this point where Lalitha believed that the enterprise will no longer require an IT department, instead there will be a requirement for business people with IT knowledge and acumen.  The focus will be on enterprise service management rather than simply IT service management.

So if the goal is to deliver value to the business by innovating and providing services that enable a competitive advantage, it remains pretty much the same as the goal of a current day CIO.  Whether the role is part of a more traditional IT department or a position with a different title remains to be seen, however I’m confident that the path I’m currently pursuing will still be relevant in 10 years’ time.

If the IT department within the enterprise was to be abolished sometime in the next 10 years or so, I believe the most likely place for the CIO role would be within the finance department, which would not be a bad thing.  In my working career, most decisions to offshore workers seems to come from the finance department, yet I have never known a finance department to authorize offshoring of themselves!

Do you believe that the days of the enterprise IT department are numbered?  Will the CIO role still exist in 10 or 20 years?  Let me know your opinion in the comments below or contact me on twitter @theroadtocio