Some interesting thoughts.

With maintenance taking 80% or more of an IT budget, now is the best time, politically speaking, to dump legacy IT

Of course, its easy to replace a major legacy system without incurring additional project costs or headcount for the transition ;-)

IT directors should consider using "good enough" technology. Giving departments the freedom to buy their own kit, including consumer equipment, can yield signifigcant savings.

Agree with the first bit, I'm a huge fan of the Pareto principle and consider most IT to be overengineered. But the second part only works with the proviso "..as long as the department don't expect IT to support it". It's easy to slash initial puchase costs, but supporting a huge variety of unknown kit in an organisation of any significant size is a nightmare. Save a few hundred quid on a non brand PC and waste tens of hours of staff time hunting for spares or working out why it doesn't work with the other bit of cheap kit. Not good.

Even worse with software - "I've just bought this package, can you just integrate it with X , Y and Z?". 

The advice is inconsistent.  "Develop an enterprise systems architecture..." - presumably designed to include integration of all the random bits of kit and code the users might just happen to find. Good luck!

I'm with @rob on this but then I've noticed that Gartner's advice in recent times is not only  inconsistent but of dubious quality. The trouble is it is hard to objectively evaluate the quality of what they're saying.

To @emily's point - when I look around at the saas offerings like Xero and Freshbooks (as examples) but increasingly Intuit (at least in the US), there is an inherent ability to integrate because that's where value can be delivered. Check out the list of integrations that Freshbooks has already done for useful things like payment gateways.

I've said it many times but Sage is a black box staring at a black hole. Way too much code, way too little resource into solving long standing problems, far too much bloat.

Rob: Fair point re bells and whistles in MS Office :-)  The thing with Sage, certainly the earlier versions, is that the bells and whistles are so much in evidence that new users tend to get lost in a pile of them.  For example, you open the debtors reporting window and you see about 50 different reports.  Put it this way, the first time I saw Sage I burst into tears!

In MS Office I think the bells and whistles are a bit more discreetly handled, with icons for the most regular tasks (e.g. save, print), and the more advanced functions tucked away in menus.  That does also have the disadvantage that they're harder for the inexperienced user to find and learn.

I agree that integration can come in many levels and the important thing is that the vendor is honest about whether they mean "produce a CSV file" or "send information directly to your other package".  How honest are vendors?

M