• In the environment where I work, which is food manufacturing, I agree with Steve, IT departments will not go away anytime soon. We have struggled for years with "engineers" on the manufacturing side of the business going rogue and taking the initiative to either buy a bunch of hardware and software, or build their own solution, to solve some issue. Unfortunately their lack of IT skills means that they don't ask the right questions (you don't know what you don't know), or they build a system that is not maintainable (the person who wrote it leaves and nobody understands what he/she did), and sooner or later the project lands up back in the hands of IT to sort out. These are usually questions about networking, system design & security, integration with existing systems (the vendor will always say they can integrate with anything) and how the system will be maintained.

    We have gotten better at having people invite IT to early discussions of projects, so these kinds of situations can be avoided. We do encourage prototyping by the people who are closest to the issue, because they understand the problem, but not necessarily the solution. Projects that work the best allow those who know the most to apply their knowledge in productive ways.