I’ve been asked about the future of the IT department a lot recently, and – brutally – I don’t think there is one.

‘IT” as a term feels like a throwback to the eighties, where a small number of boffins suddenly became the gatekeepers to the company’s information and generally refused to let the rest of us have access. A place where all requests were filed away, responded to slowly and almost always politely declined.

In those days technology was an expensive proposition, and information was the route to corporate power. So both the technology and the information were tightly controlled, and even more tightly managed.

Today the ‘I’ and the ‘T’ are getting divorced, and ‘IT’ people are having to decide which they are. It’s a significant decision.

From where I sit (I’m an early-stage, digitally-driven investor), I’d be going with the ‘I’s.

Technology is being democratised and commoditised – and the IP (the smarts) are being collectively, rather than individually, developed. For most companies I like, tech is the enabler – and the tech solutions are open source and cloud-based. They are also cheap or free. The people working on tech in these companies are domain experts who understand what the end result needs to be. They value the result over the process. These companies’ special sauce is not, and will never be, their tech.

Information, on the other hand, is where I think your special sauce HAS to be. Using data, both big and small, to understand the strength of your proposition, your customers, and your competitors, is a have-to-have for the next decade. And very probably a significant competitive advantage. Old ‘IT’ people who re-invent themselves as the enablers of information insights and the systems that create, recognize and then activate these are already rare and likely to become priceless.

In no time we’ll think about the ‘IT’ department nostalgically, a bit like we think about mainframe computers today.

The technology team will be enablers supporting outsourced and mostly commoditised solution providers. The real geeks will be creating the software for the providers.

And companies will be made or broken by the Information systems and the people who build and drive them.

So the ‘I’s will have it!