The future of Corporate IT is...

Information technology is everywhere today. There is basically no business development initiative that doesn’t include information technology as a key ingredient.

Paradoxically, the IT department as we know it will cease to exist, and in some - even large -organizations it already has (I know about a few).

The current development with the increasing digitalization of work and interactions with customers and other stakeholders requires IT to become a proactive partner to the business. IT-enabled business development will to a much larger extent be driven by business developers with IT skills who don’t belong to the Corporate IT department.

Some prophecies are just meant to happen. Systems, processes and resources that can be outsourced will be, and we will see more cloud computing for bread and butter IT, much as we have seen before with telephony and web conferencing. It will happen also for ERP and CRM, and for collaboration.

Organizations will need to strengthen their business development capabilities, which to a large extent requires knowledge and skills in IT. They need to understand and apply new technological concepts such as Social, Mobile, Cloud and Big Data - what Gartner calls "The Nexus of Forces". But it is a different skillset than most people who work in a traditional Corporate IT department have developed, as needs are shifting from implementing and maintaining infrastructure and enterprise applications to implementing services and solutions that can create competitive advantage for their business.