What is the future of the IT department?

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The future of enterprise technology is a massively important theme, which impacts organizations, vendors, governments, and indeed society at large. Taking each of these perspectives provides a different view on how the space is evolving.

One of the most interesting perspectives is from the very center of the fray: the IT department itself. It needs to deal with the minutiae of technological change as well as the macrotrends shaping organizations and their shifting place in the global economy.

I’ve teamed up with the outstanding strategist Greg Rippon of NetFocus, who I first worked with back in 1999 on a broad-ranging scenario project for a major bank, to create a one-day workshop for IT departments who want to take a structured look at the future and what it implies for their current strategy.

Click on the image for the flyer for the workshop on the future of the IT department.



These are some of the questions that IT departments need to carefully consider:

* What role will IT play in your organisation’s strategy development?

* What might your IT architecture look like in 5+ years?

* How could privacy and confidentiality issues evolve as new technologies emerge?

* What financial and resource opportunities could IT generate in future?

* How might the IT budget process change in future?

* What skills and capabilities will be required in the future?

* What new organisational capabilities will IT have to support?

* What emerging technologies will have the biggest impact on your planning?


Flowing into the answers to these questions are a wide variety of trends and emerging issues, including the shift to cloud, new software architectures, changes in security, control flowing to end-users, open source, IP issues, outsourcing and supplier management, mobile work, privacy legislation, strategy innovation drivers, governance structures, and far more.

While some CIOs and IT executives are concerned about the implications of these shifts, we believe that understanding and responding to these changes will create vast opportunities for the IT function to create more value than ever.

[UPDATE:] To clarify, this is a custom in-house workshop for CIOs and their teams. This is not planned as a public workshop, unless there’s overwhelming demand or someone wants to organize it!