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The traditional role of Enterprise IT especially in large organizations has been centered on control: from deployment of standardized desktops images, over the development of custom business applications, to large scale projects like ERP systems, as well as deployment and security controls in general.  

Recently new and "disruptive" technologies have emerged, including enterprise scale cloud computing, social software that enables real time collaboration, and Web 2.0 technologies that extend enterprise applications to mobile devices over the Web. They challenge the role of Enterprise IT, often bypassing the traditional Enterprise IT all together, and violating the standards, the know-how and the acumen of the IT organization.

These challenges have been amplified when end users see what's going on in the personal world, where social media, collaboration and mobile devices combined with user interface design, ready-to-use applications and agile un-expensive technology have substantially improved their personal lives.

Why do we need Enterprise IT if we can run our applications in the cloud and let the cloud service provider operate and manage a virtual datacenter?  

Enterprise IT leadership is required more than ever, which includes taking on new responsibilities: manage how the services of a public cloud are utilized, build a private cloud that implements a self-service model for employees that are not part of central IT, become a center of competence for appcation development based on PaaS, act as a broker between business users within the company and the myriad of external IaaS and SaaS services, and take on the integration of cloud based applications with on-premise systems.

IT faces a myriad of challenges enabling support for mobile computing, including the proliferation of different device types, different mobile operating systems, as well as display and data formats. Building a different version of a service for each new end user device will create an unmanageable environment. There are, however, emerging standards and solutions to connect mobile systems to enterprise applications, as thin clients or as fully integrated and remotely managed mobile enterprise applications.

Most people are used to taking advantage of the collaboration functions of social software in their personal lives. How can IT provide a useful equivalent in a business setting? And how can we gather intelligence from the public social networks?