If you like “The Natural,” “Rudy,” The New York Knicks, basketball or any success-out-of-nowhere story, you’ve probably relished hearing about Harvard-grad/point guard Jeremy Lin leading the Knicks to seven straight victories a week after he was a bench-warmer about to be cut from the team.

One of the juiciest aspects of the Lin narrative is that nearly every general manager, scout and metric-crazed talent evaluator in the National Basketball Association shot an air ball in evaluating Lin’s potential as a player — let alone a starter, let alone the global phenomenon he has become in the past week. A related and equally compelling story — relayed in both The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek — shows that at least one basketball talent evaluator got it right: Ed Weiland.

Weiland is a FedEx driver.

Nearly two years ago after Lin’s senior season at Harvard, Wieland, who is also a “numbers hobbyist,” contributed an article to basketball site Hoops Analyst. The piece argued that Lin was good enough to play in the NBA and possibly become a star player.

CIOs in every company have a Wieland problem these days. And risk managers now must address the same problem.

Each week, more employees turn into Ed Weilands, in the IT sense: they are bringing their own technology devices to work, installing applications they purchased outside of work onto company-issued devices and, in some case, developing their own applications to help them do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.

“A number of CIOs I talk to see many of their employees starting to outpace the capability of the IT department,” Worldwide Vice President and General Manager of HP Technology Consulting Arthur Filip told me last year. “When some employees want an application or have a need for a new IT capability, they don’t call the IT department anymore. Instead, they download something, create something on their own or adapt something via open source. You have a much more technologically savvy workforce, which creates a whole new set of challenges and opportunities for CIOs.”

And, as we all know: challenges + opportunities = risk.

The challenge primarily resides in security: how can company, customer and other sensitive data and information be sufficiently protected as it surfs on and off private devices, through applications CIOs do not even know exists and across wireless networks? The “consumerization” of IT has produced in large organizations thousands of amateur CIOs who hold the IT department to the same standard they expect when using Amazon, iTunes or their Droid-powered smart phone.

The opportunity lies in extending the IT function to larger and larger numbers of talented, technology-savvy employees who spend most of their time solving important business problems in other functions and realms. Who knows what kind of game-changing innovations these “IT in-sourcers” can develop if their talents and energies are harnessed in a way that mitigates the threats this model poses while nurturing the opportunities?

Today, the Ed Weiland Problem is a challenge for all-star CIOs and risk managers to create a game plan for. Tomorrow — who knows? It just might be CFOs who are seeking to marshal the savvy of financial-analysis hobbyists scattered throughout the organization.