From banking to airlines, through communications businesses to pharmaceutical companies, the IT landscape is littered with failures of Homeric proportions, lost opportunities and profligate waste. Across the spectrum of commercial enterprise, the IT bottom line is inevitably familiar: in general, businesses expose themselves to unnecessary levels of disruption, and spend far too much time and money on IT projects, IT products and internal IT services that frankly suck.

Too many internal corporate IT organizations are consistently failing to deliver projects on time, or to budget or to deliver what the business sponsors have asked for. IT continually fails to deliver tangible business benefits beyond maintaining the business’s dependency on computing.

IT will frequently block, mismanage, or exaggerate project complexity, or otherwise run business projects off the rails, because business requirements threaten the hidden agendas of senior and middle managers in IT organisations. Relationships between internal IT staff and external vendors can reach a point where IT managers may appear more responsive to suppliers’ concerns than to the needs of their own business users. Whatever the motivation, the outcome is that IT either invests miserably or not at all in IT projects that can deliver business value.

The negative impact of a badly chosen, poorly executed and badly delivered IT project has far-reaching ramifications, both for the business and for the fate of future IT projects. Most problems with IT failures lie within IT organisations themselves. All too frequently, business IT projects that only require a modest budget are shunned in favour of big-ticket failures. IT organisations do not like simple, quick, and effective; they do not see any justification for small, practical projects. Many organisations feed their ‘overfatted’ infrastructures on unnecessary complexity, rampant bureaucracy and plain obtuseness.

IT has been left alone for far too long, usually stuck between a rock and a hard place, IT has become an activity in itself, it’s sole task is its own survival, and its benefits to the business are typically negligible if not downright negative. In social terms, IT has become the rich-persons idiot child.

It’s not as if IT has run out of steam, the potential for IT in business is vast and probably open-ended. There are many areas of business that can benefit from innovative IT based applications, sometimes requiring large project development, but some of the most significant IT projects are usually smaller.

A CEO should know all of this and much more. IT in business must face a radical overhaul, it cannot be allowed to die, but neither can it be allowed to live as a purely self-serving organism. This is where the CEO must dictate how, why, when and where IT functions. A CEO must have the courage to change and to change IT, in order to ensure that IT works for the business.

Many thanks for reading.

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File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Martyn Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro