For a long as I can remember, and I’ve got a long memory, IT has been moaning about the lack of serious representation at board level. How can the goals of business be channelled through to IT systems if there is no input from IT at the highest level - or so the argument goes.

This is the equivalent of saying that in politics, a serious government department must be represented within the Cabinet. That makes sense, but ask any political commentator and they will tell you that you that the real source of power is most often found outside of the limelight - perhaps within the corridors of Whitehall, or even most recently, at the desk of a junior IT operator at the HMRC.

That is why the new IT strategy from Marks and Spencer is both intriguing and forward thinking. M&S’s new IT recruitment strategy is to bring in IT people with a flair for technology’s application to business, and to place them at the coal face. The technology role is no longer to be centralised, run out of the company’s Stockley Park headquarters, but rather individual teams working in different areas such as buying, merchandising, retail, and back office.

“We want people who are more business-savvy, rather than people who would just start tinkering with code,” said M&S IT director Darrell Stein in a recent interview in Computing. “It is time to focus on business people because technology is becoming more componentised. As an employer, you no longer need people to build systems, you need people who know how to apply packages to the company and get the best out of them,” he said.

I’m not sure I fully understand what “is becoming more componentised” means (a prize for the correct answer and an explanation why Word did not pick this up as an unknown spelling), but the message Darrell Stein is making is crystal clear. The bridge between business and IT needs to be made at the point where the gap first occurs – at the point where business processes are really taking place.

But as much as I applaud this move by the Board of M&S, there is a more fundamental change that needs to be brought about. After all, the IT professionals deployed at the coal face, are not the foremost experts of the system or process. In fact, they can sometimes be an annoying interference to the well established modes of operating. The question is can you, and if so, how do you, turn the end-users of systems into IT business professionals?

I would be fascinated to hear of examples from readers where you have seen end-users empowered to apply IT more effectively, or where the gap between IT and business has been overcome in other ways.