Maybe I'm just overly optimistic (that's a rare accusation for me) but I'm having trouble thinking that the combination of technology advancements made these past few years and the current wide, deep recession could possibly not result in revolutionary changes in how IT happens in most companies.

Reinforcing this belief is a Hackett Group research alert which came out this morning, forecasting a 17% increase in demand for IT services over the next two years, while IT budgets and resources will remain flat. This seems to indicate that either there will be an awful lot of frustrated users out there, or that IT will simply have to become more efficient to address the increasing demand. If history is any judge, I'd have to vote with "more efficient" as the answer... which is both exciting and frightening for the industry and those of us in it.

This is true whether you take the optimistic tack that I am on, assuming that CIOs and IT departments will find new and innovative ways to stay relevant and active, or whether you follow Hackett's worn and tired advice to weather the downturn: cost control, demand management, and discretionary cuts.

It probably comes as no surprise to the regular reader that I see Hackett's formula as a death knell for the IT department. In the face of increasing demand and increasingly easily adopted off-the-shelf services to meet that demand, making cuts and attempting to control user needs is a fast path to irrelevance for the IT department. Go ahead; tell other business units you can't get them what they need, while commercial solutions are cheaply and increasingly available on the Internet for filling out a web form and coughing up a credit card number. See whether or not those departments even bother to ask whether or not you can handle a project for them next year. Pretty soon, the CEO is going to be wandering by your office, wondering why you don't have any idea how half the data processing in the company is happening anymore and why exactly you still need that plump budget, anyway.

To be fair, Hackett discusses both outsourcing and offshoring in their cost control strategy, and both are among the techniques that I would recommend exploring. But the mindset as a whole strikes me as reactionary and defensive. I'm sure that's conventional wisdom in circumstances such as these. But I am of the school that believes that crises are times of opportunity, and that the conservative approach is better employed during more prosperous times; now is the time for risk and innovation. You have both the justification and the tools now. In two years, that may well not be the case.