IT to go outside IT department, says Gartner

People with IT experience will be a rarity in future IT departments

Analyst Gartner has predicted that "the future of IT lies outside the IT department".

The reason for this is that over the next two years, business demand for IT-driven growth and innovation will outstrip the supply of qualified people to fulfil job roles, resulting in traditional IT tasks moving outside the IT department, according to Gartner distinguished analyst Debra Logan.

She added: "CIOs are increasingly coming from the business, and users are taking control of their own information delivery infrastructure.”

The result, says Gartner, is that 40 per cent of people who report into IT in a rigid, "matrixed" fashion, or directly, will have substantial business and non-IT experience.

Gartner has identified four information management roles that IT departments will need to create if their management and governance frameworks are to remain effective:

• legal and IT hybrids
• digital archivists
• business information managers
• and enterprise information architects

The legal and IT hybrid post will add the role of litigation support manager by 2010, according to Gartner. Other duties for these hybrids will be to create policies and schedules, help design and execute discovery exercises for regulators, and mediate between legal and IT departments.

Digital archivists will be expected to appraise, arrange and preserve digital records for legal and regulatory purposes.

Logan also predicts an increasing trend towards employing business information managers, who combine business and information management expertise in a single role.

Enterprise information architects will normally be involved in creating document templates and data models.