Daryl Plummer, the chief of Gartner research, quotes three things happening in IT now.

The first is the cloud, the second is mobile, and the third is social.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

This week, all the big players, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Dell, and Cisco (I am missing a lot more, I know) are all in a spending spree busy acquiring companies on one of the three above areas.

After spending decades as an IT Director and Manager, I know the paradigm of IT:  We are an expense to an organization.  Our job is to keep things running.  But we know where IT is heading, and that’s the cloud, mobile and social.  Time to accept it.  Change or be changed.

And eventually, the Business Unit will step around IT to get what they want. 

A good analogy is owning a 16th century castle.  You spend half of your time and money repairing and maintaining all the legacy stuff from wires to pipes, and the other half trying to justify new projects like setting up a new souvenir stand. 

As Plummer would mention in the video, IT has to stop saying “No” to new projects and work with the business unit to enhance existing services.

It’s a constant battle, which doesn’t help when the other half of the world is telling you to save money by going to the cloud, trying to support the cool mobile gadgets, and finally giving a hoot what the world thinks of you and your company.

Think of what’s coming down the pipe.  And I guarantee cloud, mobile, and social are on that list.

This YouTube video is from John Taschek of the CloudBlog which delivers a clear, concise direction.  Highly recommended at 7 minutes long.