The advantages of letting go of end-user services could be huge. Think of an IT organization that has no desk-side break-fix, no LAN ports, no device procurement, no corporate e-mail, no employee information sites, no enterprise licenses for client software, no server farms for end-user applications. I'll bet it's 10 percent to 20 percent of your total IT budget: money that can be used for customer-facing applications, for predictive analytics and for transforming strategic business processes. Not to mention getting rid of the dissatisfaction that end users feel about IT over the little things.

So think about a different future. If you don't let your end-user services go, your users just might do it without you! Patty Morrison is CEO of Mainstay Partners. She is a former executive vice president and CIO with Motorola.