In an interview on ZDNet Capgemini CTO Andy Mulholland talks about the rise of cloud services and the changing role of IT in the enterprise.

The CEOs are quite noticeably reading the right articles, hearing the right information from business schools, etc., and they’re getting this picture that they’re going to have new business models and new capabilities.

So the drive end is not hard. The problem that is usually encountered is that the IT department’s definition and role interferes with them being able to play the role they want. […]

if everybody goes off and does their own thing, once again, we’ll end up with a broken company. Why? Because their whole purpose as an enterprises is to leverage success rapidly. If someone is very successful over there, you really need to know, and you need to leverage that again as rapidly as you can to run the rest of the organization. If it doesn’t work, you need to stop it quickly.

We hear a lot about individual business units adopting collaboration tools like Podio and Yammer, or about individuals adopting personal productivity tools like Evernote and Google Docs. These tools route around the time it takes for IT to vet and deploy a solution and can help teams or individuals work better and faster.

But the downside, other than possible security and compliance concerns, is that these tools aren’t being leveraged as effectively as they could be if they were deployed enterprise wide. Teams that might benefit from these tools may be missing out.

That points to the need for IT to play more business oriented role as cloud hosted services proliferate. IT also points to a change in how service providers like Capgemini must change to meet the demands of the modern enterprise. Agile development, software-as-a-service and DevOps all have a role to play in helping IT meet business challenges.