IT orgs will lose control over IT budgets in Future: Gartner

IT budgets and responsibilities are moving out of the control of IT departments and into the hands of others, Gartner says in its vision for 2012 and the coming years. Any idea who are the 'others'?

It's the business managers and business users. The business community feels empowered like never before particularly with the advent of 'Cloud' and 'Mobility'. Business users have started improving their productivity with devices, tools and applications of their choice, in many cases without consulting the IT. In the changed techno-political scenario,  IT is forced to legitimize the devices and tools that the business user started using without IT's guidance and direction. In the past, the same business user would wait endlessly for the IT to come and provide the 'right' tools or even the ERP that influences the life of a business user. And they used to work with whatever's been provided by IT even though they are not exactly happy.

Those times are gone now and the main trend that is forcing this change is the increased consumerization. With the smart phones, tablets, social networks and cool apps, business users are forcing the IT to fall in line or become irrelevant in the enterprise technology landscape. CIOs lose control over the devices and applications that the business user consumes and ultimately on the IT budget as well. In future enterprise wide IT budgets will be fought over by many a business units, the performing business unit will get the bigger pie. IT would need to keep pace with the business users and consumers and be tech savvy or face the risk of becoming sidelined.

When the public clouds become the mainstay, users will have the increased tendency to approach the help desks of the cloud service provider by-passing the enterprise IT

Is this good or bad?

• This is extremely good news for small and medium IT service providers (vendors).  They always find it difficult to make an entry into enterprises mainly because of the CIOs love for the large scale vendor that provides all the possible services required by the enterprise though quality is something that needs to be desired
• This will provide an opportunity for niche IT service providers (someone who specializes in SharePoint or mobile or CRM and the likes). This results in high quality technology solutions
• Business-IT alignment won't be a big problem like before. Since it's the business that demands the IT capabilities, there will be less of business-IT alignment problems in future. It's not the IT which is imposing its whims and fancies on the business
• Technological innovations will sneak into enterprises rather quickly resulting in rapid ROI
• Business users will be the change agents rather than the IT 

What's the role of future IT orgs?

One flip side that I see with the trend is, there may be a lack of holistic IT strategy for the enterprises that may result in islands of apps and tools incompatible with each other.  Each business unit (particularly powerful, performing business units) will influence the technology landscape which they may not be well aware of. Here's what IT will have a role to play

IT and the CIOs will have to take more of a governance role. They envision the IT road map- be it the infrastructure architecture or data architecture or the application architecture. Business can choose the solution they think would help them accomplish their business objectives and create value for their customers, but within the contours of the roadmap set by IT

Except for the above, I don't see any issue with the predicted change. I welcome it.