There was a time when the IT team sat firmly on the edge of the corporate story. We were the people colleagues called when the printer would not work, the projector refused to connect, or a password needed resetting five minutes before an important meeting. Useful, yes. Loved, not very often. We were often treated as slightly mysterious and easiest to value when something had already gone wrong.
That caricature was never entirely fair, but it hung around for a long time. Popular culture did not exactly help. IT people were often portrayed as brilliant but awkward, closer to the machine than to the boardroom, and usually one power cut away from becoming either the villain or the punchline. Whether it was The IT Crowd, the obsessive hacker stereotype in film and fiction, or the technologist cast as either hero or hazard, the image stuck. IT was essential, but not always embraced. The role of the Chief Information Officer in public sector and academia, where I first cut my CIO teeth, was often jokingly reduced to the three Ps: PowerPoint, Projector and Power. It was funny because every now and then it felt just a little too accurate.
And yet today the picture is completely different. Technology is no longer on the edge of the business. It is so much of the business. Every function now depends on data, platforms, cyber resilience, automation, AI, and digital experience to do its best work. The language of technology has escaped the server room and entered every board discussion. Suddenly everyone has a view on copilots, agents, platforms, technical debt, and the future of work. The IT team, now more often called the Digital team, has moved closer to the centre of how organisations think about growth, risk, productivity, and transformation.
That should mean this is our moment. But old habits take time to shift. Many organisations still instinctively see digital teams as the people who fix, secure, recover, and explain. The opportunity now is to expand that picture so we are also invited to shape, imagine, and lead.
Now comes the twist. As generative AI, low-code tools, and agent-building platforms become easier to access, more people can create things that once sat firmly inside the technical domain. That can feel a little unsettling, although if we are honest it is also what many of us have been working towards for years. We talked about democratising technology, encouraging engagement, and helping colleagues feel more ownership of digital tools. Now it is happening, and happening quickly. So perhaps this is not a crisis of relevance at all, but a test of confidence. Maybe this is where the next version of our role really starts to take shape, not as the people who own every tool, but as the people who help the organisation use technology well, with trust, architecture, ethics, resilience, governance, value, and change all firmly in view.
If we compare ourselves with finance or HR, it feels more than a little different. When we are working through the detail of a budget, we turn to finance and trust their expertise. When we are dealing with a complex people issue, HR is rightly where we go for guidance. With digital, the relationship can still be a little more conversational, a little more curious, and occasionally a little more adventurous than we might choose on a busy Tuesday morning, especially when someone has found a shiny new tool and is already halfway through a pilot before telling anyone.
The relationship with IT has changed, but trust and understanding are still evolving in some places. We now have the engagement many digital leaders hoped for, and with that comes more questions, more opinions, and sometimes a healthy amount of experimentation. That is not always the simplest environment to work in, but it is probably the natural consequence of becoming central to how organisations think and work. In many ways, it is a much better place to be than being overlooked altogether.
This is where the argument gets interesting. If the old model of IT leadership was built around control, expertise, and a degree of technical gatekeeping, the new model feels more open, more enabling, and much more human. The opportunity is not to become less relevant, but relevant in a different and arguably more powerful way. Professionalism still matters. Operational excellence still matters. But so does vision, judgement, and the ability to help people navigate change without either slowing everything down or letting everyone run off with the keys to the kingdom. Somewhere in that balance is the modern digital leadership job description, even if nobody has quite written it like that yet.
If big organisations are finally going to fall a little more in love with their IT teams, a few things need to keep changing. First, technology leaders need to be seen as business leaders who happen to work through technology, not simply technical custodians waiting for the next crisis. Second, digital teams need to keep translating complexity into clarity so colleagues see not just the machinery, but the value. Third, organisations need to recognise that technology is not optional infrastructure sitting quietly in the background. It is one of the most important enablers of culture, performance, resilience, and trust. We may still need the occasional well-timed slide to make the point, but perhaps fewer than we once did.
The early days of the pandemic and the arrival of lockdowns brought this into sharp focus. Almost overnight, technology became the thread that held businesses together, and IT teams everywhere found themselves moving from essential in theory to essential in very visible practice. It was one of those moments when the value of digital became impossible to miss, even if many of us would have preferred the recognition to arrive under slightly less dramatic circumstances.
That shift matters because the best digital work is often almost invisible when it is done well. It is there in the resilience that keeps operations steady, in the customer experience that feels seamless, in the growth that is enabled by better platforms and better information, and increasingly in the way AI is reshaping expectations across the organisation. The digital team may still be called most loudly when something breaks, but its real value is just as often found in the many things that quietly keep moving, improving, and connecting behind the scenes.
And perhaps part of digital leadership now is learning how to work with the full range of reactions technology attracts. There are the gatherers, collecting every new idea and insight with genuine enthusiasm. The visionaries, who can already see what the next version of the organisation might look like. The theorists, who enjoy the debate and the possibility of it all. The engineers, who just want to build, test, and improve. And, of course, the righteous, who arrive at exactly the right moment to remind us what good governance, ethics, and responsibility should look like. Truth be told, you need all of them. Just maybe not all speaking at once.
So perhaps the question is no longer whether organisations need an IT team. That one is settled. The better question is whether organisations are ready to see their digital leaders as central to strategy, culture, and reinvention, not just as the people who keep the lights on. If the future of work is being rewritten by technology, and it clearly is, then maybe now really is the time not just to rely on the IT team, but to trust them, include them, and yes, perhaps even fall a little bit in love with them. Preferably before the Wi Fi goes down.
As a little postscript, it is worth remembering that it is not always wise to tell people you work in IT. Travelling in Europe this year has become a little more complicated for UK residents with the arrival of the new Entry and Exit System. I was reminded of that while standing in a queue in Warsaw for 90 minutes, surrounded by people becoming steadily more convinced that if something digital was not working, then IT must obviously be to blame. I resisted the urge to explain that it was not the technology that was broken, but the process and the way it was being used. On reflection, that was probably the right call. It is hard to feel loved by a queue.