We often say that the biggest, and in many ways most exciting change we are witnessing in business today is the changing role of the IT department. In the past, they have acted as high priests of everything more technical than a digital watch, certifying or (more likely) banning the use of new tools until such a time as they reach such widespread acceptance that they have no choice but to accept them. In the future, we hope individuals and lines of business will have much greater latitude to choose and run their own tools, with IT managing the underpinning services and the plumbing.

The paradox of IT's apparent aversion to innovation and change stems in part from their dual role as developers and custodians of core IT operations. Developers are by their very nature innovative, inquisitive and experimental. Operations managers need to be conservative and cautious to keep the machines running and the network traffic flowing.

Olivier has expressed his surprise that many CIOs are not up to speed with new technologies and techniques that we sometimes take for granted, and would like to see them prioritise communication flow over operational processes in knowledge-based organisations. But if you recognise the duality of the IT portfolio, then this problem is less surprising.

I spend a lot of time working with IT departments in large companies and sometimes it does indeed feel like you are banging your head against a brick wall. Sometimes, internal IT departments more or less admit to pursuing a certain path not because they think it is a good one, indeed in some cases they fully expect failure, but because it is what people expect them to do. I find this very sad.

One of my favourites is when people say: 'What can we do? We are a Microsoft shop', to which the answer is of course 'No! You are a consulting company / bank / oil company or law firm.' Or, echoing Nemo's father in Finding Nemo, they respond that although users think they can do things for themselves, they just can't - it's all too hard. My colleague Lars sometimes calls them the 'bandwidth preservation society'.

Nicholas Carr goes further, as usual, in arguing that most companies do not need a CIO as a board-level function because they basically do what their vendors tell them to do. I am not sure I agree with this, and I have met some quite sharp and clued up CIOs recently who I believe want to deliver business value rather than just hand over the keys and budgets to Microsoft or a.n.other big vendor.

The recentForrester report suggesting that CIOs want their social tools in a one-size-fits-all product suite is not a good sign. This is the old way and is simply lazy thinking. The best solutions right now in this space are flexible, diverse, context-specific and situated. There is simply no best-of-breed all-in-one solution to all of the social, sharing and collaboration needs of different organisations. Those who fool themselves or their users into thinking that there is a silver bullet out there should simply give it up and outsource themselves.

What's the answer? I wish I knew! But it probably begins by swtiching the default setting to 'can do' rather than 'not possible' and as IT becomes less mysterious and more of a commodity, perhaps we can see IT functions judged by business value rather than system preservation. I think we perhaps also need to see the operations or plumbing side of IT become less powerful with regard to the innovation and development side of IT, who should be working closely with lines of business to understand and serve their needs rather than seek one-stop-shop solutions that are based on the lowest common denominator of centralised functionality.