Michael Krigsman (Twitter) asks: Is IT becoming extinct?

He says it won’t happen overnight, but there’s a clear trend and he outlines seven reasons why. These two stand out for me:

IT services have become a commodity. Nick Carr’s article, IT Doesn’t Matter, described infrastructure computing as a baseline of plain vanilla IT services. In this new world, IT is caretaker rather than strategic business partner or visionary.

Now this is certainly not the case in *all* IT departments, but for the ones where it is true, I think they are at risk. If you’re not seen 5 tips to prevent IT extinctionas a visionary and strategic partner by people outside of IT, then do whatever it takes to change this perception.

Social media empowers users at the expense of IT. Enterprise 2.0 companies marginalize IT by putting powerful tools directly into the hands of non-technical workers, bypassing IT in the process. Dennis Howlett (Twitter) says traction is already there:

“The outwardly facing socialprise applications and services I am seeing are not just fundamentally different in approach, they are proving successful.”

CIOs: This means you have to take these tools seriously. You have two options:

1. Partner with your business users and support their use of these tools
2. Resist – and they’ll still use them. You’ll be marginalized and have no influence at all. (Note my use of the word influence, not control. You can’t control what business users do anymore. You _can_ participate, and by doing so you’ll demonstrate that you get it, which gives you influence.)

Here are more tips to prevent IT extinction, courtesy of Mike.