10 'New Rules' for IT

For those of you familiar with Bill Maher’s “New Rules” on his HBO series “Real Time,” you might appreciate some new business technology rules. (For those who don’t know the show you might still appreciate the perspective represented by the following rules – which should be followed at all times.)

Here we go:

1. CIOs should come from the business – not the technology – ranks: technology-rooted CIOs will never really understand the importance of business as the technology driver. When prospective CIOs start talking about network latency and virtualization it’s time to get the hook out; go with the pro talking about up-selling and cross-selling every time.

2. Business technology professionals should be grown in BT farms, the way we grow shrimp, salmon and lobster. These pros, like the fish, will be tastier and freer of the toxins they may have picked up in data centers (which are known disease breeders).

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3. Vendors are designed to be squeezed. Can anyone justify the margins that software or services vendors get? Please, if someone’s going to get 50+% margins on their products and services, they deserve to have someone hold them upside down and shake cash out of their pockets.

4. Software is designed to be rented. Who – in 2007 – in their right mind would embark on a five year five hundred million dollar implementation project? Only crack addicts would smoke this story. Even Microsoft, the mother of all enterprise software vendors, gets this.

5. Get over the lack of privacy. It’s been gone for years and most Americans would sell their personal data for a $50 a year, so long as you promised them a free Diet Coke. The fact is that privacy – like everything else in the world – is for sale at the right price.