Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

You will start to see the marketing and operations groups hire what would have been traditional IT resources. The roles of project managers, vendor managers and business analysts will shift first. Marketing and operations will hire business analysts to help them define their needs and determine which vendor to use. Project managers will help them make sure projects are executed on time, and vendor managers will make sure things operate smoothly after go-live.

If you think about it, these roles are all traditionally IT, but they are non-technical in nature. They have been part of the IT organization as an extension of the IT team’s discipline, process and methodologies (something marketing teams are not known for). By hiring these resources directly, the marketing team is no longer competing with other business priorities. These people will likely come from other IT departments (or even internal IT), but they will have their brains rewired to think of “what can we do” versus “why that won’t work.”

So what does this mean for traditional IT? Big data + mobile technology + outsourced services = big headaches for IT teams. These teams will turn their focus on governance and information management. Governance will become key; organizations will struggle by enabling these business units to deliver autonomous IT services while at the same time protecting the company’s interests. Just because something can be outsourced doesn’t mean it should be. CIOs will find themselves in the position of reviewing IT contracts for projects they are not involved in delivering. Getting an IT review of a contract will follow a similar process to the one legal departments use today.

Traditional IT teams will start to build robust information supply chains and strong enterprise service bus architectures. They will spend time thinking about mobile device management and information security. In short, they will focus on either the large and complex IT systems or the glue that holds them together. This will put significant cost pressures on the CIO, whose budget will now not be tied to many, if any, revenue-producing projects. CIOs are going to have to fight for every dime.

Another very legitimate fear about this is IT departments might be gutted to the degree that they won’t have the budgets or resources to deal with things the business units aren’t interested in, such as infrastructure. For example, there are lots of legal and regulatory reasons why putting everybody on personal Gmail accounts might not be a good idea, even though that would still get a message from Shirley’s desk to Bob’s desk. Part of this facilitation is helping figure out what the units actually should take over versus what they really should not take over.

Business technology will be absorbed by the business. It’s happening in your organization today. My advice is not to fight the tide but to embrace it. Take a look at your project portfolio and determine which projects could be shed to your business partners with the least amount of risk. Start having conversations with your operations and marketing counterparts about the business analyst role transitioning to work directly for those business units. Spend time on documenting and training your counterparts on solid vendor management practices such as contract negotiation and service-level agreements. Focus on how to make them successful without IT involvement in their projects.

What do you think? If you disagree (or even, heaven forbid, agree), please comment below or send me a private message. Or check out the Twitter discussion on @todd_michaud.