How big of a threat are emerging technologies to the traditional IT department and the people who work there? John Kogan, CEO and founder of Proformative - a community and resource for corporate finance, treasury and accounting professionals - sees big advantages to cloud computing and software as a service when it comes to the bottom line:

You don't have to staff your server room with the proverbial "IT guys" because you no longer own and manage the servers (or any of that other expensive gear). Someone else does. They hire the professionals--typically more people with more expertise than you could justify in your IT budget--and you rent their services. And since everything is consumed as needed, you have access to support staff whose sole focus is delivering and supporting the infrastructure that they rent to you. You improve your uptime and establish a direct correlation between IT spending and IT utilization while reducing capital and operating costs dramatically.

Why should IT worry?

This is a tremendous shift since it's estimated that more than 60 percent of IT spending comes in the form of administration and support. To put that in perspective, if your IT costs are $5 million per year, you're spending $3 million of that just to keep the lights on.

But maybe your head isn't on the chopping block just yet. Kogan also contends that, "IT departments will not disappear in the wake of cloud-computing-based applications, but they will need to redefine their value position to an organization." Redefining your value position - it always sounds like a good idea. -- Don Willmott