Ask Slashdot: What Will IT Departments Look Like In 5 Years?

Lucas123 writes "As consumerization of IT and self-service trends becomes part and parcel of everyone's work in the enterprise, the corporate data center may be left behind and IT departments may be given over to business units as consultants and integrators. 'The business itself will be the IT department. [Technologists] will simply be the enabler,' said Brandon Porco, chief technologist & solutions architect at Northrop Grumman. Porco was part of a four-person panel of technologists who participated at a town hall-style meeting at the CITE Conference and Expo in San Francisco this week. The panel was united on the topic of the future of IT shops. Others said they are not sure how to address a growing generation gap between young and veteran workers, each of whom are comfortable with different technologies. Nathan McBride, vice president of IT & chief cloud architect at AMAG Pharmaceuticals, said he's often forced to deal with older IT workers coming on board who expect his company to support traditional email like Outlook when it uses Google Apps.' Sooner or later, IT departments are going to change. When do you think that will happen, and how will they be different?"

Everything old....

[jeauxkewl]

... is new again. I've been centralized and decentralized multiple times. I swear, some people make a good living pushing the beans back and forth across the table and declaring victory. There will always be economies of scale for centralization of shared services and there will always be techies with some level of intimacy with the business to support their applications and communicate requirements. The fact that self-service IT continues to grow simply reinforces the need for champions/advocates at the business level that help requesters pick and choose their products from a service catalog. At the end of the day, Joe User couldn't care less where his services reside.