It seems that these days almost anything and everything is available as a service. Software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) lead the way, but you’re probably also now familiar with platform as a service (PaaS) and the all-encompassing concept of IT as a service (ITaaS).

And as sure as night follows day, other subsects of the IT sphere will receive the aaS treatment over the coming years as line-of-business increasingly bypass IT departmental budgets and controls.

It’s little wonder, then, that IT executives the world over are nervously looking over their shoulder as they ponder which will be the next of their traditional responsibilities to be stripped away from them and hurled up into the clouds. Research suggests that more and more businesses will avail themselves of an ever-increasing portfolio of cloud-based services that can replace the IT functionalities traditionally managed in-house. So what next for the humble IT department?

Well, first of all, senior managers must look beyond the need to structure and control these external relationships and think ahead about the enduring roles that will continue to define the business and the IT department itself. Simply put, the CIO must determine which core IT functions is likely to be necessary in order for the IT organisation to remain relevant to the enterprise. And this needs to be done as a matter of urgency.

The irony of the situation is that in an era when nearly everything can be thought of as a service, the future roles of the IT department will most likely centre on the delivery of yet another aaS — this time management as a service.

IDC research in recent years has underscored the accelerating migration of the IT department from being a manager of technology to a provider of hybrid business-IT services. And one of the underlying drivers of this change has been the emergence of credible cloud-based alternatives to internal IT services.

Senior IT executives typically dedicate themselves to serving business interests and promoting IT initiatives that enhance business value. And that certainly isn’t going to change. But with enterprises having variable, interchangeable, and transitory requirements for IT as the business adapts to external changes in its ecosystem, CIOs must become equally agile, adaptable, and able to reinvent IT services on the fly. Indeed, these can be viewed as the new prerequisites for anyone aspiring to be an effective provider of business services to enterprises that are continuously reinventing themselves in terms of their provision or use of cloud-delivered products and services.

The key here is for CIOs to concentrate on a few key competencies and IT disciplines that are business-focused. Traditional IT build-and-maintain functions will become non-core roles as they will all soon be available at comparable quality via the cloud, if they are not already. So what’s left for the IT department to do? Well, quite a lot as it turns out, and most of the retained roles are more valuable to the viability and sustainability of the enterprise than the traditional functions they will replace.

Chief among these roles will be the need to provide information management. This will become particularly pertinent as the demand grows for an enterprise view of the critical applications, data, and technology architecture dispersed across the organisation. In a virtual world, enterprises will be identified less by their capital value and more by the value of the information that they author and control. The IT department, as an internal monitor, will be the logical repository for information management, particularly as the relevant answers will be spread out over many relationships and interfaces with other service providers.

Another obvious responsibility for IT departments of the future will be the provision of security and risk oversight in relation to the use and misuse of enterprise information. This will involve cost analysis, vendor evaluations, the ranking and prioritising of IT projects, and the assessment of best practices. As these tasks are clearly aligned with business goals, the IT organisation must be viewed as a partner, playing a primary role in evaluating the capabilities of technology to support business initiatives and optimize value and profitability.

The IT department’s role in sourcing and service delivery will also be critical. The development of new business systems will increasingly be a function of synthesising the roles of many services providers, and the IT department can serve as the translator of business vision into technology action and as the adviser to senior business management on the viability of new technology products to support business value. In such a scenario, the CIO will play a critical role in linking business and technology planning, ensuring the long-term relevance of the IT department to the organisation’s future success.

Ultimately, it is impossible to discern a final set of core IT competencies that will survive the next five to 10 years, and the above suggestions represent just the tip of a steadily melting iceberg. Almost everything can or will soon be sourceable in the global IT services marketplace, and it is fantasy to think that businesses will automatically turn to their own internal IT departments when speed, agility, adaptability, and continuous change are the new badges of business success.

The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC) He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC