Commoditisation
There is a wider issue here in that in today's environment users have very high expectations in terms of what can be delivered, how fast and for what cost. Take an old, but simple example: you want an email address, you go to hotmail.com, type in a couple of details and press submit. Job done - and it was entirely free.
Now go to your 1990's IT department and say, "right then chaps, I'd like you to get an email account for everyone". Cue wringing of hands, pursing of lips and warnings of months of work and hundreds of thousand pounds of cost.
This is becoming a much more wide-spread problem as "cloud" services move from being just email to a wide variety of enterprise apps. The business can still visit a website and click submit to get access to storage, CRM, video editing, etc etc. And they expect their internal IT department to be as responsive.
There are two principle issues here:
1) The self-service cloud solutions don't have to worry much about a lot of the issues that internal IT departments worry about: integration and security being two of the main ones.
2) IT departments generally don't (yet) have the ability to respond quickly and cheaply to new business needs.
Issue (1) is about understanding when these things matter and when they don't. Then leveraging the opportunities to use rapidly provisioned on-demand services appropriately. Issue (2) is about improving the underlying systems that provide business services and moving towards a Private, Enterprise cloud solution.
I don't really agree therefore with the thrust of the article. It isn't about process or communication for most IT departments anymore - they generally have this in fairly good shape. The issue is that business expectations are outstripping the ability of IT departments to deliver. Tooling would certainly help, but the underlying infrastructure architecture is the key issue - and this is something that typically doesn't change overnight.
Will the internal IT department ever be able to catch up, or will we need to become enablers to help the business use cloud services appropriately?