What's Wrong with IT?: Page 2

Project management looks great on paper but try finding professionals who know how to identify, sell, manage, fix and kill projects? What about standardization versus agility? Everyone knows that the business unit with the biggest profits makes the rules – even if it means yielding to “standards” and other annoying rules.

Vendors also make me angry. Not the small ones trying hard to get our business or blaze a new technology trail, but the big, entrenched ones that see us as dependent on their products and services.

Especially egregious are the large enterprise software vendors that still – can you imagine? – in the on-demand era expect us to pay huge annual maintenance fees and then upgrade fees – or they charge us extra just to keep the old stuff running, until we have no financial choice but to upgrade and begin the maintenance cost cycle all over again.

Once the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is perfected, there will be hell to pay: the corporate CIOs I work with will jump ship so fast their revenue heads will spin. Time to short enterprise software stocks? Oracle, SAP and Microsoft really need to re-think their fee structures. On-demand applications, open source software and the growing repository of Web-based components will threaten existing software delivery models to the breaking point. Do the vendors really understand this – or are they in denial?

Lastly, let’s acknowledge that most of our leadership is pretty self-absorbed. I tell my students that the best path to corporate influence is through personal bonuses and compensation packages. This is equivalent to modeling managers and executives as self-serving, self-interested actors who respond well to financial incentives but don’t react that well to initiatives that only help the company. Like public company CFOs, they focus squarely on short-term gratification and initiatives that put money into their pockets.

What did I miss?

What makes you angry?

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