IT budgets and responsibilities are moving out of the control of IT departments and into the hands of others, thanks to trends such as consumerization and cloud computing, Gartner says in its vision for 2012 and the coming years.
That means, to be successful, IT organizations will have to excel at relationship management and be adept at coordinating more widely distributed activities, according to Daryl Plummer, managing vice president. "As users take more control of the devices they will use, business managers are taking more control of the budgets IT organizations have watched shift over the last few years," Plummer said in a statement. "The IT organization of the future must coordinate those who have the money, those who deliver the services, those who secure the data, and those consumers who demand to set their own pace for use of IT."
IT departments need to adapt now or be swept aside, Plummer warned.
[ Learn about consumerization of IT in person March 4-6, 2012, at IDG's CITE conference in San Francisco. | Get expert advice about planning and implementing your BYOD strategy with InfoWorld's 29-page "Mobile and BYOD Deep Dive" PDF special report. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobilize newsletter. ]
UP FOR DEBATE: 33 hottest IT arguments
With that in mind, here are Gartner's top 11 predictions for 2012:
1. Low-cost cloud services will cannibalize up to 15 percent of top outsourcing players' revenue by 2015.
Just as low-cost airlines disrupted the transportation industry, the projected $1 trillion IT services market is facing further disruption from industrialized low-cost IT services, which Gartner describes as "an emerging market force that will alter the common perceptions of pricing and value of IT services." Vendors will need to invest in and adopt a new cloud-based, industrialized services strategy, the research firm says.
