So alleges Bob Lewis in an excellent InfoWorld article dissecting the traditional perspective that IT departments should operate as internal mini-businesses with other departments within the company as their customers.

Internal customers, Lewis says, simply encourage both IT and other departments to behave with a "the customer is always right" attitude that frequently puts uneducated users in the driver's seat with respect to technical decisions better left to IT experts. Moreover, as with most supplier/customer arrangements, the interests of both parties are fundamentally opposed... what is best for the customer isn't best for the supplier, and vice versa. A common feature of such implementations, departmental chargebacks for the use of IT resources, is inconvenient to corporate strategic planning and defeats much of the point of keeping any IT services in-house... inefficiencies abound in such systems. And as Joe McKendrick points out in his take on the article, setting IT up as just another provider puts it up against external suppliers with whom it will frequently compare unfavorably... a significant and growing threat as CIOs find more and more of their traditional role usurped by low-cost, easily engaged SaaS firms.

I had thought this outmoded model was already on the wane, driven aside by practicality and a growing understanding that the best strategic use of internal IT resources is in partnership with other business units, not in subservience to them. If the whole business/IT alignment kerfuffle that has played out over the past couple of years hasn't been about exactly this subject, then what has it been about? If "aligning IT with the business" didn't mean integrating IT with the rest of the business, as Lewis suggests, what exactly was the point?

But Lewis says this isn't an emerging consensus, or a growing trend, but instead a guerilla approach that is still off the radar in most IT organizations. I hope he's wrong; it hasn't been what I have been seeing recently, but I don't work with enterprise IT shops, and perhaps the inertia of those large organizations has been outpaced on the whole alignment thing by the smaller and more nimble companies I work with. If so, that's bad news for enterprise IT, and specifically for enterprise CIOs, because they are going to continue to look very bad compared to increasingly adept and specialized outsourcing solutions, all of which are becoming easier and easier to engage and use without any need for corporate IT to get involved. As I have said before, the end-state of such a situation, sooner or later, is with the CEO and board ultimately realizing they don't need and shouldn't be paying a CIO to head up a massive internal IT organization.