2012 - The year of silo demolition in business?

This post sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Paul Muller, and HP Blogger published a post on the Enterprise CIO Forum titled Twelve thrilling (or terrifying) thoughts for IT in 2012.

This time of year sees a lot of ‘prediction’ articles…most are worth the read and some aren’t.  Paul’s is worth a quick read. Rather than lay out a long, drawn out post about what he sees in the coming year, Paul gives a quick list of what he sees coming in 2012 based on what he’s hearing from his clients and colleagues.

Paul writes:

To be clear, predictions as a general rule are wrong the minute they’re made, mine doubly so! However, I have made a conscious decision to focus on what I’m seeing and hearing from practitioners versus theoreticians and I hope that they stimulate us all to think about the disruptions we might face and how we can be better prepared to respond if and when we need to.

Jump over to read all of Paul’s predictions for 2012. I provide some thoughts on some of the more interesting predictions below.

Paul’s first three predictions are most interesting to me. They are:

#1 IT as a team sport – IT management goes social.

#2 Death of the pager, IT management goes mobile.

#3 Breaking down the silos – agile, continuous delivery and devops.

Prediction #1 and #2 are coming (and are already here for some organizations). That said, I don’t see many people talking about them…so Kudos for Paul for including them.  Most IT professional’s find the ‘social’ world to be a frightening place due to security and process issues, but most people I talk with understand social is here to stay and there are plenty of benefits in adopting a social approach to their work.

Prediction #3 is where the real challenge lies in just about every organization today.  Regardless of what we all say, there are still silos in most organizations…and the IT group is the biggest silo builder (along with Finance and HR).  These silos are breaking down though.  Consumerization, social and Shadow IT are helping tear them down but they aren’t completely down.

The future of IT…whether it be in 2012 or 2020…will depend on the ability of the CIO and IT group to get things done. And by done…I don’t mean have them planned or have them ‘in progress’…I mean done.    The speed of business is getting faster and the IT group has to keep up.  Breaking down silos is the first step.

Here’s to hoping some silos are busted down in 2012.

Image Credit: Missing Silo Roof By kahala on flickr

This post sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.