Last week we asked the IT experts in our audience a simple question: what are the most productive changes an IT department can make today? Your responses were tremendous. Let’s take a look at the top suggestions.

Embrace consumerization

“As an IT Director myself, trained in the IT environment of 8-10 years ago, accepting the ‘consumerization’ of IT was a bit difficult for me,” writes severusx. “However, I can attest to the big increase in efficiency it provides my department. Our company has about 150 users that are highly geographically dispersed, and due to high turnover and high management costs, I made the decision early on to only provide company-owned assets to the ‘corporate’ employees located at our central offices and a few select territory directors. The rest of our users are provided access to company resources via Web services like Outlook Web Access and SalesForce.com. This in turn provided me with the ability to cut back on help desk staff and focus on the job of building the right type of IT structure to promote growth in a new company.”

For most companies, embracing consumerization is less about the wholesale shift from corporate-owned to personally owned computers and more about supplementing corporate PCs with employee-owned smartphones and tablets. The question is whether to let workers hook these devices up to corporate networks—and, if so, what kinds of policies and security controls to put in place.

Some readers lamented their employers' reluctance to embrace consumerization, arguing that both end users and IT pros can increase productivity with mobile access to e-mail. But others pointed out potential downsides.

“On the topic of allowing personal devices to connect with and sync data to the network: I work at a company that will remotely wipe your entire phone, not just the company-owned assets on it, when you leave the company or if there's a risk it's been compromised,” writes reader Trodamus. “IT professionals can probably understand and bounce back from that pretty quickly, but for most users it'd be jarring to lose all of your contacts (among other things) if you hadn't been making backups, to say the least.”

Train users, give them the tools to control their own destiny

Too often, tension between the IT department and the general user population holds back business tech. But training users, and even letting them take charge of their technology infrastructures, could greatly improve productivity, some of you suggested.

“Training for users would be nice,” writes CompSciGuy. “I know that is a cost sensitive issue for companies, but they would save time and money in the end.”

Colleyryan agrees, writing, “Have IT staff pair up with experts from other disciplines in the company to offer more in-depth and knowledgeable training. Maybe someone from the PR department could team up with an IT employee to teach users about a tool like Twitter.”

A more decentralized approach may make sense in some cases, says Pokrface, a reader with IT experience at a multinational aerospace company. “What I’d like to see IT do is to become the keeper of standards and the recommender of methods and ways, presenting the ‘correct’ way to do things for the rest of the company. Individual business units should then be empowered to accept IT computing standards or roll their own solutions, with the hard and fast understanding that they are on their own for support and interoperability. This lets IT focus on producing and documenting what will hopefully be the best solutions without wasting time on enforcement; at the same time, it gives flexibility at the BU [business unit] level to deviate from standards where it makes sense.”

Virtualize

When IT pros discuss technology that can improve efficiency and flexibility, virtualization in its many forms is one of the most mentioned.

“Someone was saying how they blew their budget on shiny new laptops when a netbook would have sufficed. There is a similar issue where I work,” reader Pinko! writes. “We currently have users running PCs with Core i5s or Core 2 Quads to run Office or some proprietary database software. That is a lot of wasted energy. The last place I worked was running thin clients at the desktop connected to a Terminal Server. Applications were virtualized and the servers were running at a healthy load. There was a lot more bang for your energy dollar. Server virtualization is also a path that my prior and current employers are on. In my experience, this has been a truly wonderful technology that has brought down the number of low-usage servers that sit and idle your money away.”

Reader severusx weighs in again: “The single biggest and best change, from my point of view, is the move towards SaaS/PaaS [software/platform as a service] and virtualization products in small to medium business. When all I have to worry about is an Internet connection and the software development part of an application, it makes my job 100 percent easier. No longer are large clusters of servers with expensive database applications needed. We simply build the app on our preferred cloud provider and off we go. While IT budgets have been largely flat or decreasing, we are able to more with less because of this change.”

Stay out of the way

Some of you discussed the question of whether IT should actually create policies or simply enforce them, with the general feeling being that IT should avoid dictating business needs.

Reader Devin reminds us that “IT serves the business IT should never dictate company policy, security or otherwise. IT should translate business needs and priorities into policy that enables users to work with all information technology transparently. I've been at too many companies where IT uses a hammer to drive stakes through chains shackling the users. This causes business to suffer, customers to complain, and reputation to decline.”

In response to a suggestion that IT pros need to learn to “get out of the way,” steviesteveo writes, “Amen to that. You have to be careful that the tail doesn't start wagging the dog when looking at IT.”

On a related note, several of you said that IT can improve productivity and boost its reputation simply by spending more quality time with users.

“Technology exists so that we can bend it to our will, to make our lives and jobs easier,” writes ronelson. “This means that IT people need to spend some time with the people who will be using the technology, both to work side by side and get a better understanding and to have ongoing discussions with the stakeholders. Of course, they have to do more than just spend time, they have to listen. Groups that listen may not be the cheapest or fastest, but what they deploy is adopted and enjoyed by the users.”

Get the basics right

Distressingly, several IT pros in our audience say they can’t focus on big-picture improvements because their IT departments just haven’t gotten the basics right yet. In some cases, businesses won’t spend the money to update outdated systems; in others, money gets spent inefficiently.

“Consumerization, Cloud, VoIP, Virtualization—these things are all nice but require the IT department to be evolved enough to do them,” flameboy writes. “As a SysAdmin I still see so many IT teams that can't get the basics right and instead spend all of their time reacting and fixing the same problems over and over. The single best change for most IT departments would be taking a step back and taking a critical look at what you do and how you do it. Work out what is wrong. Then fix the quick wins (stabilize the patient) so you can free up some time, find and fix the bigger problems, make things repeatable (document, automate) and keep at it.”

Reader Devin agrees, saying that a key IT change is “fully embracing root cause analysis. Nothing shows off inexperience and outright incompetence more than allowing the same incidents to occur time after time. Too many times I've noticed that organizationally we treat symptoms and very rarely cure the disease.”

Clearly, today's IT departments have problems—but they're also staffed with people embracing compelling new solutions. IT is changing fast, driven by the proliferation of consumer devices in the workplace, by cloud computing, and by virtualization. Ars will play a key role in working out IT's future, and it's great to see so many thinking through the cultural, technical, and process issues involved in turning tech into a truly useful tool.