Business users abandoning IT for quicker self-serve cloud apps

Eighty seven percent of business managers said they agree or strongly agree that research is critical to serve and support their clients, according to a Forrester survey of 2,961 business users from Q4 2010, presented at Forrester's IT Forum 2011 May 25 in Las Vegas.

Contributing to the innovation gap are organizational structures pursuant to this agreement which only one in five IT organizations report to a business unit, according to a report from Forrester analyst Nigel Fenwick.

Since asking IT for something big is a political issue if it doesn't report to you or your business unit, it could very so then save time for business managers to whip out a credit card instead of calling IT when they need something.

Gartner just published a report encouraging CIOs to move quickly to cloud computing, in part for the cost-efficiency it can add to IT, in some cases to put IT itself in a position to deliver more sophisticated IT services to business units more quickly than without heavily virtualized infrastructures.

The cruel truth about the easy-to-use

The cruel truth about the easy-to-use, business-enabled Web 2.0 is that it allows clients – both external and internal – to vote with their feet.

In evolutionary terms that might be the way to go; in practical terms it would be a disaster leaving technical decisions to people whose research vision isn't clear enough to tell the difference between Cloud and fog.

ITworld Answers is a service that helps IT pros resolve innovation questions. Post a question, and let your peers in the ITworld community take a crack at solving it!