The new conventional wisdom is that the CIO and IT organization are becoming relics, as business technology decision-making and purchasing move into marketing, sales, HR, and other departments. Who needs a big IT organization, the reasoning goes, when tech-savvy line-of-business workers and their managers can buy the server capacity, storage, applications, and devices they need with a few clicks and a credit card?

In a column titled “New Face Of IT: Line Of Business Execs”, InformationWeek contributor Patrick Houston relates the example of LivingSocial, a Groupon-like startup whose HR chief, Jennifer Trzepacz, ramped up cloud-based recruiting, payroll, and employee performance-management systems in next to no time–all without an IT department. Concludes Houston: “Trzepacz and others like her–managers who know their disciplines more intimately than IT could–are destined to command ever bigger shares of enterprise technology budgets.”
Network Computing