IT departments risk becoming an irrelevance

I was interested to read your feature on tablets in the workplace (Putting tablets to work) and was surprised by the results of the web seminar poll at the end of the piece.

When asked what were the most important factors when considering tablets for business use, not one of the answers included user experience, or user adoption. Surely the current consumerisation of technology, and the departmental adoption of cloud services outside of the IT department, show that users need to be put at the heart of decision making if IT is to remain relevant over the next few years of dramatic change?

To not do so risks IT presiding over an under-used infrastructure while business users head off using their own devices to access their own applications.

Charlie Cowan