Undoubtedly the greatest bit of hype around the predicted rise of cloud computing is that the role of the CIO and the IT department is going to be diminished as end users bypass internal IT and go directly out to the cloud for what they need. That is until the cloud provider goes out of business one day, and you find out your people can’t get access to all those great documents and ideas and data they had stored in the now-shuttered provider’s servers. Or until the group of go-getters discover that the Web app stopped working for their co-conspirators in the St. Louis office because of some conflict with that location’s new server settings. It’s for reasons like these that agency IT departments will still need to be fully engaged with the process of making sure end users have the IT resources they need to do their jobs. What will change as cloud computing gets more popular is where those resources are coming from, and that will mean a change for IT department’s role, not the reduction or elimination of it.