IT is facing a perfect storm where rationalization is no longer the central agenda. We need to reinvent IT and our own roles. Two thirds of CEOs believe IT will a business differentiator in the next decade - the tradition model will no longer cut it. We need to re-imagine IT.

This means we need to:

Embrace postmodern business - focussing on customer involvement, delight and intimacy.

Aggressively pursue simplicity - need to reduce the complexity associated with more information and systems. People need an easy to use interfaces that works on any device and doesn’t require user instructions or manuals. Simplicity hinges on people-centric design and context-aware computing.

Become comfortable with creative destruction - rebalancing how much is spent on being reliable versus being dynamic & innovative. Traditional ways of thinking need to be challenged. We need to kill binary thinking, eliminate perfectionism & embrace calculated risk taking and undertake targeted destruction.

There are many trends and forces that impact how we re-imagine IT. For example, the economic climate is forcing IT leaders to adopt three major approaches to budgeting - investing in growth, trimming on budgets or outright restructuring. We will also see the emergence of ‘cloud brokers’ who aggregate services in the world of cloud services.

The time has come for many applications to be rebuilt from the ground up to drive simplicity and ubiquitous access. The higher volumes of data, from a range of sources, make pattern based interpretation a key capability that is essential to presenting the right information, in the right context and at the right time.

The traditional service provider model has set the agenda for relationships with the business. Taking business requirements and building solutions without challenge shuts the door to true partnership between IT & the business and kills opportunities for innovation. The traditional supply and demand model’s days are numbered.