Every week, I share the most interesting and useful tech articles that I’ve found over the past week. This week’s top articles focus on the future of on-premise IT, managing legacy apps, and more. I hope you find them useful:

IT shops as roadblocks to data analytics projects
Business groups in a growing number of companies appear to be plowing ahead on data analytics projects with little input or help from their own IT organizations. Rather than leveraging in-house IT skills and technology, many business groups are using their own data and department-level analysts to cobble together analytics strategies, according to a survey by IDC.

BI on the Go
As organizations on one side (and mobile BI products on the other) mature and grow, the adoption and evolution of mobile BI applications will enable both end-users and vendors to incorporate key capabilities into mobile BI solutions. This will enable mobile BI to continue changing the way traditional users consume and produce business intelligence and analytics solutions.

No future in on-premises IT
While I don’t necessarily agree with the assertion that on-premise IT will disappear, the author makes a good point: To avoid irrelevance, you must change and grow. You can dig your heels in and cling to the past, but that will not help you once cloud-based tools overcome the increasingly addressed concerns over security, availability, performance, and flexibility. While I do believe we’re a ways away from a total cloud takeover, we will see more companies opting for a hybrid approach–moving certain applications to the cloud, while keeping some in house.

Keys to successful application modernization
Not long ago, application modernization focused on updating legacy mainframe software. Nowadays, Web-based applications that are only a year old can be considered outdated. This shift is occurring in part to social, mobile and cloud technologies.