If the Corporate Executive Board's crystal ball is prescient, enterprise IT in the year 2015 will look very different from the way it looks today. Business units will take over more and more IT-related activities, while outsourcers will take on more, as well. Most alarmingly, perhaps, less than one-fourth of today's IT employees will remain on the job.

In a recent report titled "The Future of Corporate IT," the board outlines five changes it foresees in IT organization and management, which it says will be "rapid, permanent, and radical." The report examines some conventional wisdom on IT trends and reassesses them in the context of broader developments in business, the workforce and the economy.  

In a nutshell, the five forecasted changes are:

• Information will become more important than process.
• IT will become an integral part of business services.
• Applications development, infrastructure operations and back-office processes increasingly will be handled by outside parties.
• Business leaders will have greater responsibility for IT.
• The stand-alone IT operation will be about one-fourth the size it is today.

For more:
- see the Corporate Executive Board report: "The Future of Corporate IT"

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