I must say that the recent prediction that web and collaboration tools will lead to corporate IT departments becoming increasingly marginalised made me smirk.

Analyst firm, Gartner published its business intelligence (BI) and performance management research agenda last Friday and said that, as individual users and business units use these tools to build their own analytic applications, IT’s role in delivering such functionality will diminish.

By 2010, it said interactive visualisation, in-memory analytics, search integrated with BI, software as a service (SaaS) and service oriented architectures (SOAs) would allow business users to build and consume their own BI reports.

I smiled as I recollected a BI vendor espousing its vision of ‘a dashboard on very employee’s desk’ or ‘putting the tools in the hands of the business users,’ and that was almost four years ago. Now it seems the technology is catching up to make this a reality.

“Evidence suggests that BI is used aggressively by just 15% to 20% of business users,” said Kurt Schlegel, research director at Gartner. “For the BI sector to thrive, it needs to overcome the fact that most business users feel BI tools are hard to use.”

But IT can’t have it both ways: on one hand, IT bemoans the endless list of reports it is asked to compile from ageing database silos and change requests it has to handle. On the other, it fears the loss of control that will inevitably come with putting more web-based and collaboration tools in the hands of business users.

I would’ve thought Gartner’s BI predictions would be welcomed by IT. It’s not like they’ve nothing to do in the meantime. Facilitating the maintenance of the infrastructure (the ‘keeping the lights on’ bit), not to mention the governance, security and availability of these new systems, will mean IT remains just as important to the core running of the business as it’s always been.