May 23rd, 2005
Deja Vu: IT may matter, but the IT department may not
According to Silicon.com’s Andy McCue, Gartner has reported that outsourcing, offshoring and the increasing amount of control of IT being handed to business units is leading to the death of the IT department as we know it today. Looking to anecdotally confirm Gartner’s findings, Silicon.com interviewed 12 UK-based CIOs, two-thirds of which confirmed that IT departments will be shells there former selves in five years time. In January 2003 (well ahead of Gartner’s prognostications), I wrote Long live the CIO, but kiss the IT department goodbye. And I didn’t even mention ASP outfits like Salesforce.com, Rightnow, and Authoria that are making it fashionable to have one-person (the CIO) IT departments. You (ZDNet’s readers) took issue with the headline (see: Why IT departments won’t disappear). But in light of the new findings, do you still?
