Central IT departments used to make sense.
When technology was complex and custom-built, you genuinely needed a dedicated team of specialists to keep things running. That was the only option available.
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Kit Cox
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Founder and CTO of Enate.
The software most organizations use today comes pre-built and ready to go, with no computer science degree required.
And the work that used to justify a centralized IT department simply doesn’t exist anymore.
The wrong people are calling the shots
The people in your business who actually deliver the work understand their own challenges in a way no IT team can. They know where the friction is. They know which processes are broken. But the decisions about what to do about it aren’t theirs to make.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
An operations manager flags that client approvals are getting lost because half their team uses email and half uses Slack. But when IT eventually gets round to fixing the problem – after clearing a six-month backlog of tickets – they build a workflow tool that requires everyone to log into yet another system no one asked for.
The tool gets deployed and the operations team tries to use it… only to find it causes more problems than it solves. Meanwhile, IT ticks the box and calls it done.
That disconnect is the reason why technology keeps failing to deliver what it promises.
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We’ve seen this movie before
The current AI hype has a familiar shape. Massive investment, huge promises, and not much to show for it.
A recent MIT study found that 95% of businesses are getting zero ROI from their AI investments. Researchers have called this the “GenAI Divide” – a gap between the handful of organizations extracting real value and everyone else, stuck wondering where their money went.
Sound familiar? It should. We saw the exact same thing with RPA a decade ago. Grand promises and isolated use cases, with no way to scale because the underlying operations weren’t ready. Companies spent millions automating broken processes instead of fixing them first.
The lesson from RPA wasn’t that automation doesn’t work. It was that you can’t automate your way out of a broken operation. You have to fix the operation first.
A lot has changed since the false promise that was the RPA days. The people closest to the work aren’t stuck waiting for IT to fix things anymore.
No-code platforms have made this possible. A few years ago, building a tool meant writing code. Now it means dragging and dropping. The barrier to entry that used to leave operational teams relying on IT has basically disappeared.
An operations manager who would have spent six months waiting for IT to build something can now have it running by Friday, without tickets or long waits for the IT department to fit it into their roadmap.
That’s citizen development in action.
What IT departments actually need to focus on now
None of this means IT disappears. Far from it. There are things that genuinely need specialists – identity and access governance being the obvious ones. Security doesn’t run itself, after all. Neither does compliance.
But gatekeeping every technology decision in the organization? That’s not IT’s job anymore. It never really was, if we’re being honest. It just happened because no one else could do it.
Let IT focus on making sure the organization runs securely, while everyone else gets on with solving their own problems.
The shift is already happening
The organizations moving fastest on this aren’t the ones with the biggest IT budgets. They’re the ones that have given up on the idea that all technology decisions need to flow through a central team.
And the CIOs still gatekeeping what tools their teams get to use – and how they use them? Teams are already finding workarounds that let them skip the official approval process. Gatekeeping hasn’t stopped the shift. It just means IT isn’t part of the conversation.
If you’re a CIO, you have a choice. Empower your teams with no-code tools that let them solve their own problems. Or keep gatekeeping and watch your influence shrink as teams find ways around you.
The CIOs set up to thrive aren’t the ones with the biggest IT departments. They’re the ones that know when to stand their ground, and know when to put technology into the hands of business users.
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