Where are IT departments heading?

I read a tech report about the demise of the IT department and the current reasons why there’s a good possibility these departments will shrink in the next few years. So I wrote this little article about my personal experience with IT departments over the years…
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For me it started in 1987.
That was when our company purchased three little Mac Plus’ to do our printed catalogs with. There were already about forty M-DOS computers which had a daily need for the company’s IT department. Those DOS things were basically a nightmare in numerous ways! The employees using the DOS computers would come around and marvel at the way our little boxes operated… so much nicer, user friendly, and more efficient than anything they had been trained on. The IT staff had a different attitude. They believed that any computer which didn’t require their assistance was not worth paying attention to. I could also see that the Macs were a pure threat to their job security as well.

The graphic department’s little Macs also proved to be quite trouble free as well. Looking back at the end of the first year, it was evident these computers which did things differently also required very little maintenance. They were basically problem free! The IT department appreciated the ‘headache’ computers but had a sometimes outspoken disdain for our devices.

Over the decades, having worked at numerous other companies in graphics, I have seen this same scenario repeated over and over in various incarnations. Even when Windows finally entered the workforce, the non-Macs almost always had some type of need for IT. There were always some aspects which weren’t user-friendly for the office staff and had to be maintained by a techie expert to operate well.

I really thought the IT departments would shrink far greater than they had by 2000. I’m a bit surprised they have been around as long as they have when technology had got to the point that their services were no longer in great demand… and I’m not talking about the future, I’m going back a ways.

I think there will always be a need for some type of IT department. Perhaps it will evolve where the position is part of a bigger job description. Perhaps it will be a position where one person can do what three once did. With both computers, and the end-user’s abilities being what they are now, I can’t imagine IT not evolving in some way as well.