Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

You don’t have to look very far to see the factors behind this shift. Social media is bigger than porn. Ninety percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years. Netflix accounts for more than one-third of the world’s Internet traffic. Over a billion mobile apps were downloaded on the last week of 2011. Your users have as much computing power in their pockets as the server running your tape backups.

The business IT world has been slow to keep up with these new developments. It has been called “The Consumerization Of IT,” and it’s what happens when you take powerful computing platforms and make them very easy to use and very cheap. One of the results of this shift is that users are becoming highly savvy technology people. The bar has been set on how easy it needs to be to deploy and use applications. Technology has become so pervasive in our everyday lives that many projects traditionally considered IT projects are now being done without any involvement from the IT team. Is there an IT person out there, who bought their mother or father an Android phone for Christmas, who really thinks their world isn’t about to change dramatically?

In many cases, these aren’t small skunk-works projects that are destined for failure but medium-to-large projects that are often huge successes. Can you define the role of the IT department in deploying SalesForce.com to the sales team or Radian6 to the customer service team? (Not the role IT is given in the project, but the role that matches its expertise with the project’s needs.)

I can deploy a great looking, fully functional restaurant mobile application for well under $10,000. I can manage all social media activities on highly effective, low-cost cloud-based services. Looking at it from a pure dollars-and-cents perspective, why should a company waste highly paid IT resources in participating in the project or support?

Listen, I get it. I’ve been in IT for 17 years. Before you get out the pitchforks and boiling tar, let me explain. Neither accounting system nor the ERP system is going to be turned over to the users any time soon, and many E-Commerce sites are massive systems containing dozens or even hundreds of servers. These large and complex systems will remain within the confines of the IT department to deploy and manage (for now).

I am not saying that IT departments will go away. The point I am trying to make is that not all technology projects will continue to be managed by the IT department. For each IT person who is reading this column, it’s my bet that if you look at your current projects list there are at least a couple (if not more) projects where you would define your primary responsibility in the project as “not letting them shoot themselves in the foot.” If that is IT’s primary role in a project, then things need to change.

You will start to see the marketing and operations groups hire what would have been traditional IT resources.