What’s the future of information technology? Everything will be faster, development will be easier, and integration will be as simple as building something out of Tinkertoys. In fact, development and integration will converge into the same set of activities — finding the functionality you need and connecting it into a functioning application.

Sure it will. Of course, building something useful out of Tinkertoys still requires a design and a plan, and taking two somethings built out of Tinkertoys and sticking them together will still require consistent designs, but no matter. That isn’t what this column is about anyway.

This column is about the future of information technology organizations, not the technology itself. That future, as stated here many times before, is to be a collaborator with the rest of the enterprise in designing and achieving useful business change.

Imagine you’re convinced and ready to go. What happens next? Do you add an agenda item to the next executive staff meeting to make the announcement? Sure — you’ll stand up, say, “Ladies and gentlemen, the IT division has officially redefined its role in the enterprise. We’ve been a service provider that strove to exceed your expectations. Now we’re a collaborator in designing and achieving useful business change,” and sit down.

That will work. Not on this planet, mind you, but in an infinite universe there must be a world circling some other star where it would.

Here on earth you need to be a bit more subtle than that, because of three dark little secrets most in business don’t want to admit.

The first is that advocating change is a whole lot safer for a business manager’s career than actually implementing change. Advocating change is fine and noble, making it clear you’re firmly focused on achieving great things for the enterprise through visionary programs fraught with exciting opportunities. Actually implementing change, on the other hand, involves quite a bit of risk and more than quite a bit of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-sweat hard work.

Advocating change while avoiding its reality is, fortunately, quite simple: Blame IT. Business change requires new information technology. Most IT projects are less than successful, so the odds favor nothing happening. And if IT does deliver working software that meets the specifications, that doesn’t mean anything anyway — the software might run, but it’s always easy to find reasons it doesn’t support the business.

That’s the first secret — perhaps overstated, but present at some level more often than not. The second? IT likes advocating change more than it likes implementing it, too. Proclaiming that we’re change agents makes us sound like a potent force in the enterprise, and creates work for analysts and programmers besides. Building software that meets the specifications is hard but straightforward work. But if anyone tries to actually use it, we all might discover a flaw in the premise, and that’s even worse for our reputation than building software that never gets used. We can always blame the business for the bad specifications.

Okay, so I’m still overstating things. There’s enough truth in all of this to make everyone uncomfortable, as it should. The third secret, though, I’m not overstating at all: Most businesses have killed their ability to adapt to changing conditions. They call it “lean and mean.” If they’d called it emaciated and unpleasant — the more apt description — even Wall Street might have understood the fallacy.

The IT division you lead is embedded in an enterprise accustomed to treating IT as an internal supplier, and to IT treating everyone in the enterprise as internal customers. Most people like it that way. And there aren’t enough employees left in the business to work on a large business change initiative anyway — at best, there are barely enough to keep the place going. IT should collaborate with the business to achieve change? How’s that going to happen?

That’s a great question, which means, as everyone knows, that I don’t have a great answer.

I do have a half-decent one. It will have to wait until next week, though, because we’re out of space and I have to finish getting ready for our two upcoming seminars.