CIO Forum: 'Young people will kill off the IT department'

Young people are proving to be a disruptive force in the enterprise which will bring about the demise of the IT department as we know it today, according to technologist and futurist Peter Cochrane.

Making his keynote at today's silicon.com CIO Forum, he said: "Young people are pulling technology up and pushing at the boundaries of it uses. For that reason they're incredibly powerful in your company."

Young people can benefit organisations because of their fluent use of a number of technologies and their abilities to multitask and share information.

However, Cochrane warned, to get the most out of youngsters, managers must learn from them and not impose too rigid a structure on them.

When young people come into the workforce, they don't want to be told by an IT department which hardware and software they can and can't use, he explained.

This is one reason Cochrane predicted "corporate IT departments are going the way of the typing pool".

The tech-savvy workforce of the future won't need or want the usual type of IT support. "I can guarantee the young people coming into your company know more than the IT department," he said.

IT workers won't disappear altogether but they will have to change what they do - they will need to aid in the creation of business models that impact the company's direction. "If IT doesn't do that, who will?" he asked.

Cochrane, formerly CTO and head of research at telco BT, envisages an enterprise where workers are given an 'allowance' to spend on IT in exchange for giving up the right to tech support - a scheme that was pioneered at BP by silicon.com Agenda Setter Jim Ginsburgh.

He said: "People need support. They don't need an impeding force from within the company. If we empower people and lay out what's expected of them, they'll rise to the challenge."

Cochrane also called on business leaders to adopt the mindset of "anything and everything goes" in order to make their organisations efficient, productive and innovative.

He said: "People look at problems through a soda straw - they don't see the big picture. [Business leaders] have to look in new directions."

For instance, he encouraged events companies to employ modelling tools for predicting crowd behaviours and advertising agencies to take advantage of young people who are willing to create adverts for a small fee, as Apple did with its iPod ad campaign in the US.

Cochrane blamed recent IT project failures on the derision of the technologist, or 'nerds' over the last 30 years. "Managers thought they didn't need to understand technology to manage it. I find this appalling," he said.

In fact deep knowledge of IT is vital to businesses' and society's success, he said - and pointed out that 'nerds' - including Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple's Steve Jobs - have become the richest and most influential people on the planet over the past three decades.