Martin asks: are these companies’ IT departments moving from being “suppliers” to “slaves”, or from “suppliers” to “integral parts of the business”?

My hunch is the former, given the retail sector’s on-off successes with IT investments and programmes generally. And if this is the case, it might prove disastrous.

Even if you outsource all your IT provision, you can’t do without a technically-literate IT governance and oversight function that also understands business goals, strategies and priorities. Without that capability in-house you’re opening yourself up to the selfish (and why shouldn’t they be?) agendas of suppliers, whose interests are unlikely to be naturally 100% aligned with yours.

It might be, of course, that the IT Directors in question didn’t fulfil that function—that they were largely IT support managers. In that case, it’s probably fine to outsource their roles. But it only makes sense to do so in the context of a larger picture that involves hiring into a new governance and oversight position.