As an aside... does anyone actually use the term "ASP" anymore? I don't really care, SaaS, ASP, it's all the same to me, but I think the blog categories should probably be consistent with current usage... I'll change that one if people agree.

I've been reading lately about Serena Software's new Vail mashup platform for non-technical business users, which sounds swell (if it works well-always a big if with unseen software) to me, but has been garnering some interesting reactions from other IT executives.

Representative of the discussion as a whole is Chris Murphy's blog over at Information Week, which covers the various historical aspects of IT department control and concern with control in a nutshell. In essence, centralized control of the information systems has long been a Holy Grail for most CIOs, while new technologies such as mash-ups and Software as a Service (SaaS) have been putting control back in the hands of the users. This has been a back and forth battle since the PC pushed the mainframe off the pedestal of corporate information systems.

Murphy points out that SaaS and user-driven content management and development are becoming more and more accepted among IT executives, and I think that's a good thing. It has to be balanced with overall system management objectives and business goals, but it's almost a no-brainer that when your department is too stretched to provide everything that users are asking for, the next best thing is to ask the users to do it themselves.

So my question is, who out there is still afraid of getting end-run, and what are you doing about it, if anything?