By Mariano Gomez, CEO, Maximum Global Business, LLC

The changes within IT organizations over the next five years will be significant, and smart executives are already anticipating a major shift in strategic emphasis.

I am making my predictions about the most important changes based on having attended a few Microsoft Dynamics GP Sales seminars in the past couple of months, as well as compiling experiences from some of my customers who attended Convergence.

Overall, the days of building and maintaining systems and technology will give way to the days of applying technology to solve key business problems - the real purpose of Information Technology. Microsoft officials, at Convergence and other gatherings, have been placing a great deal of effort on delivering the enterprise wide collaboration platforms around Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, accompanied by the tools to support business process management with the delivery of the new Corporate Performance Management.

Focusing on information is a real challenge and a shift in paradigms for many IT directors. For the most part, IT directors are used to making sure the corporate network and the hardware elements are in top shape to maintain the company interconnected. Don't get me wrong! Infrastructure management is a must, but certainly not enough to provide the organization and its executives with the information required to make critical business decisions day in and day out.

Hence, in the next few years organizations will see more need for project managers and business analysts as part of the core IT staff. So, what about infrastructure? As organizations move forward with the adoption of technologies like SharePoint, Corporate Performance Management, and begin to prepare for a new wave of Microsoft Dynamics GP upgrades to "v11", these responsibilities will fall more and more with infrastructure vendors and will give even more way to managed services organizations. A new function will be required to manage vendor relationships and service level agreements (SLAs).

You may have started to experience it already: increasingly your organization is demanding individuals with expertise in collaboration tools, business analytics, and project management, with the sole intention of delivering better decision support systems across the board. This has not happened overnight and clearly, these demands will continue to grow as the "Extended ERP" continues to grow.

So what can your organization do if it hasn't started down this path already?

1. Contact your Microsoft partner to start learning the capabilities of SharePoint. If your organization uses Microsoft Dynamics GP Human Resources, begin by creating a HR site to deliver employee information. Create project sites and document libraries for each of your organization's customers, rid your organization of file based shares and add indexing capabilities to your documents. Begin to use Microsoft Dynamics GP Excel based reports.
2. Start small. Start with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and gain confidence with one or two areas, for example Business Portal, SQL Reporting Services (SSRS). Once your organization is comfortable with these areas, move forward!
3. Focus on quick wins. Deploy Excel reports to your most critical business users; start with WSS, which has no licensing cost to your organization. Work with your Microsoft partner to leverage other aspects of your Dynamics GP implementation. They may not need to be integrated to SharePoint.
4. Scout out the market for professionals in these areas. Let's face it--this economic downturn has a lot of good professionals waiting for a chance to get their careers back on track. Your organization may just benefit from this situation. However, if you have internal resources already trained on .NET development, this can be an opportunity for career development.