But you can feel the heat from it burning the exposed flesh at the back of your neck in many organizations if you suggest that perhaps IT should pull back from its traditional role of desktop management and support and allow users to handle more system management and even (gasp!) procurement on their own.

As you probably know, I've been advocating this sort of approach for some time now, so I was gratified to see this InfoWorld article discussing the trend.

This isn't so much a diminishing of IT's role as a change in focus; as the InfoWorld article points out, the company's data and security are still vital to operations, and reducing the effort required to support the fiddly bits being mucked about by end users allows more time and attention to be lavished on those core services. As hardware becomes more reliable and cheaper, and software becomes easier and more intuitive, it only makes sense to pull the level of corporate IT support further up the chain. This isn't necessarily new or unique; after all, back in the mainframe days, there were even more layers of staff between the average user and the backend data structures... specialists were required to help determine the logic for report requests and data input operators typed information in rather than clerks. As technology advances, though, it becomes increasingly abstracted to the users. SaaS and other advances make the type of hardware and software at the end of the chain increasingly irrelevant to the core business function... and so the importance of maintaining and supporting that end of the chain becomes less important.

Of course this is heavily dependent on the environment and requirements; as I have stated elsewhere, it's probably a process that will begin out where the edges blur between personal technology and business technology, with phones, PDAs, and laptops being the first candidates for end-user management. It will be a while before you will see burly guys out on the shop floor choosing between Mac and PC for their CAM software interface. But it's an area where IT departments can afford to be aggressive; with cutbacks almost certainly coming, the opportunity to push off the dead-weight task of end-user support and systems management and take up sexier and more relevant functions with greater import such as Process management and architecture revision may be a golden one.