Changing roles of IT in

The impact of global slowdown and busted Internet ventures may have led to a rationalized view of the role IT play in businesses. But that has not stopped global 2000 businesses from investing for collaborating with partners and customers. IT has drastically reduced cost of collaboration in the last 20 years. One consequent change in the business environment is the delineation in emphasis on point-to-point transaction-based relationships towards dynamically managed many-to-many collaborative relationships. This is paving the way for the genesis of a dynamic, globally collaborative business environment which in our view, will be driven by IT. Executing global collaboration, from an enterprise standpoint, would pose a serious technological challenge. Even though true global collaboration will be the result of a right mix of organizational, social, legal, cultural and political influences, the role of IT will be significant in managing such collaboration. This paper looks at the changing roles information technology play in shaping the future of collaboration in the context of enterprise businesses. It also tries to establish that IT is about human-machine relationships and concludes that collaboration is the most basic benefit of introducing IT to enterprises. While doing so, we would attempt to define the evolving technology waves shaping the enterprises of the future, given the other dependencies. We would also attempt to define for the first time, in our opinion, what the next generation of IT driven enterprises would look like. In the process, we arrive at a means of measuring IT dependence of an organization.