Mark McDonald on IT Planning for 2011

Mark McDonald, of Gartner, offers some excellent tips for IT planning for 2011 in a post titled Three things to think about as you plan for 2011.  In the post, Mark suggests thinking about these three things:

• Markets are fracturing
• Everything’s social
• Technology is moving away from IT

These three tips are excellent and worth doing a deeper dive into, but I’d like to look at the third tip in more detail.

Technology is moving away from IT

Mark writes:

Technology is no longer the unique purview of IT.  Increasingly technology services are available via public markets either in terms of hardware, network connectivity and applications.  While these go under fancy names like cloud, SaaS, managed services etc, you have to recognize that you are no longer the only source of IT services and capabilities.  Unlike outsourcing, which was largely an IT administered decisions, business leaders can provision their own technology.  Business leaders have choice.

Absolutely true.

I think it would be hard for anyone to argue that any function of business could not go around the IY team for any of their technology needs.  So…for IT to remain relevant in the future, what can we (IT) do to be the provider of choice?

For one, we can stop acting like a vendor and start working with the business to deliver true value to them.  Let’s start with that and see what happens.