{"id":649754,"date":"2013-03-31T15:00:21","date_gmt":"2013-03-31T19:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=625635"},"modified":"2013-03-31T15:00:21","modified_gmt":"2013-03-31T19:00:21","slug":"technology-is-king-so-why-are-so-many-it-departments-playing-backseat-roles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/649754","title":{"rendered":"Technology is king, so why are so many IT departments playing backseat roles?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s IT departments face an identity crisis. Technology is an integral part of every single business process, and has come to dominate the lives of consumers who are routinely shopping online, downloading information, and browsing the Internet.<\/p>\n

Yet ironically, in an era when technology rules, IT departments are losing ground fast:\u00a0\u00a0The forces of cloud computing, social media, and information management are evolving rapidly, and business managers are discovering and adopting new technology before IT departments even have a chance to master it. Gartner Research<\/a>\u00a0predicts that by 2015, 35 percent of most companies\u2019 technology-related expenditures will be managed outside the IT department\u2019s budget.<\/p>\n

In order to thrive and have an impact in today\u2019s businesses, IT departments must stay relevant. They must become service-oriented organizations. That means deploying user-centric and agile solutions that meet the business needs of the organization and individual departments. That means delivering IT as a Service (ITaaS), and becoming a team of service-oriented experts.<\/p>\n

SaaS: An often too-quick fix<\/h2>\n

The increased availability of Software as a Service applications (SaaS) makes it easy for individual departments to “go rogue” within an organization. Employees sign up for inexpensive outside-the-firewall public-cloud\u00a0SaaS apps because they\u00a0are convenient, easy-to-use, and address immediate needs \u2013 and because they believe they can meet\u00a0their business needs better and faster than their IT department.<\/p>\n

But users inevitably run into problems and end up going to IT for help. They may need to integrate the public-cloud\u00a0application with another internal service, and\/or import or export data. Then IT staff find themselves in an awkward position. They have to quickly master the application, understand the problem, and solve it. Along the way, they will likely identify risks associated with the use of this product \u2013 including critical security issues. Had they been involved right from the start, they could have provided real strategic value instead of simply putting out fires.<\/p>\n

The lure of the public cloud<\/h2>\n

Likewise, developers are under the gun to conceive, prototype, and test applications, and then to get them into production. They often turn to public cloud providers for initial prototyping, testing, and even final deployment. The cloud offers a easy, self-service platform that developers can control and works the same across the development, testing, staging and live deployment phases. This practice relegates the IT department to the sidelines, and can minimize its value to that of maintaining legacy systems and infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Breaking the vicious cycle<\/h2>\n

IT departments that remain passive legacy-system babysitters will be caught in a vicious cycle.\u00a0Today, it is the CIO’s responsibility to bring awareness in the organization about the hidden dangers of decentralizing IT.\u00a0<\/span>There are four major ways to elevate IT\u2019s role within the business, transforming it from being an old-school roadblock to a visionary service-oriented enabler:<\/p>\n