Today's IT department is a very different animal from the IT department of even five years ago. The Internet, advanced communication tools and virtually unlimited storage have made your users much more productive, and the boundaries between people's lives in the workplace and the home have largely broken down. As a CIO, it's up to you to use that knowledge in the workplace and provide your users an opportunity to use the tools they use in their every day lives. That means offering tools like corporate-wide instant messaging and wireless devices. Your users' adeptness at these tools also means that the corporate IT department now has a somewhat different function. To do that, your users' experiences should rank right up with reliability, security, scalability and compliancy. It also means letting users do what they are good at instead of fighting against it. To start, find out how people really work, don't hinder the evolution of technology at your company, say yes whenever possible, and focus on enforcing rules instead of making them.

To learn more about the new shadow IT department:
- read the article at CIO