The Disconnect Between Management and the Value of IT

DavidHumus writes "According to a Wall St. Journal article top executives at most companies fail to recognize the value of IT, having a tendency to think of information technology as a basic utility, like plumbing or telephone service. The article lists five primary reasons for 'the wall' between IT and business: 'mind-set differences between management staff and IT staff, language differences, social influences, flaws in IT governance (defined as the specification and control of IT decision rights), and the difficulty of managing rapidly changing technology.' Does this fully explain the extreme lack of understanding of IT at high executive levels? The article is even-handed in apportioning blame but touches on a few good points. In particular, how '[m]ost top executives ... think of IT as an expensive headache that they'd rather not deal with.'"

"top" execs

[Lonewolf666]

The top execs are the true victims of the IT bubble and nonsense IT sales pitches they bought into that ended up just costing them and their company valuable time and resources. Add to that the possibility that they lost boatloads of personal capital on IT stocks, it should be enough to justify their phobia for the sector altogether.

So, we're talking about guys who
-jumped on the latest bandwagon without thinking about the actual usefulness of IT for their business
-or maybe were just afraid to look obsolete
-and wasted some of their own money buying the latest crap stock because it had ".com" in its name

Yeah right. Exactly the kind of guy who should NOT lead a company. Or at least only a company held privately, with himself as the only investor ;-)

Re:utilities are important

[tompaulco]

But does the plumbing infrastructure need to be redone every few years?
Yes. If you try to "right size" your plumbing infrastructure, you will have to redo it every few years and it will cost you much more in the long run.