If there’s anything harder than predicting the future, it’s reaching a consensus about it. The trends affecting IT today are easy enough to spot—outsourcing, globalization, increased regulation, increased complexity and never-ending demands from the business for growth and revenue—but it’s much more difficult to figure out how all these trends will converge to determine the size, composition and strategy of the IT department over the next few years.

So we read the research—not only our own "State of the CIO" surveys (see www2.cio.com/research for all the data) but also studies by other organizations—and talked to some of the more thoughtful and visionary CIOs we know to come up with a portrait of what we call the Postmodern IT Department.

The executive summary goes like this:

The Postmodern IT Department will be smaller, more distributed and dependent on a tightly integrated supply chain of vendors. It will be in desperate need of multitalented specialists who have in-depth technology knowledge but who can also create new products and capabilities that businesspeople might never have envisioned.

CIOs will need to transform themselves into innovation leaders, not merely infrastructure stewards, and they will have to remake their departments in that image.

IT will need to be a full partner, if not a leader, in business process innovation.

Now let’s get granular and see what the Postmodern IT Department will look like and how it will work.

1. IT will assume responsibility for business innovation across the company.

IT has spent the better part of 40 years automating business processes. It could do more, but that’s not what the business is asking for. "The discussion that the business wants to have today is, How are you going to partner with me to win in the marketplace?" says Shaygan Kheradpir, CIO of telecom giant Verizon. "They see that the world is full of IT innovations that the customer never asked for. When did a customer ever ask for the iPod or Google? Yet once they get them, they can’t live without them."

IT can envision what the business can’t by combining broadband connectivity, the Internet, software, and even gadgets like cell phones and PDAs into new processes and capabilities that solve the problems of the business and its customers. "IT departments can’t be focused simply on making internal customers happy anymore," says Ann Senn, national managing director of strategy and innovation for Deloitte Consulting U.S. "They have to be focused on what’s going to deliver value for the enterprise and external customers. It’s not about just getting the marketing department to stop yelling at me."