I was reminded during an exchange between another consultant and myself in comments over my recent entry on how to pick a CIO of how de rigeur it is for those of us in this profession, and indeed just about anyone in the lower rungs of the IT world, to regard upper management as a bunch of sycophantic, helpless incompetents with delusions of grandeur. The wildly popular cartoon "Dilbert" has epitomized this view for years now and it is a rare IT department where you wander through the cube farms and don't see any Dilbert cartoons, with put-upon engineers and breathtakingly stupid pointy-haired bosses (PHBs, in the vernacular), hanging above the desks.

Yet on the whole, American industry has historically defied this categorization by being extraordinarily successful in the global economy. As much as we tend to see our superiors as dunder-headed idiots, these were people who managed to steamroll the competition and lead their companies to greatness (while, of course, trampling the common worker beneath them along the way). While I don't make a habit of doing so, I happened to be reading Slate this morning and came across an article suggesting that's no longer the case. From a history of creating and managing enormously complex systems successfully, Daniel Gross argues, American industry has turned into a group of people who can't balance their checkbooks.

It's hard to look around the IT industry and argue with Gross' point. We're importing more technical staff than ever and begging for even more. And that's just to handle the things that we can't outsource. Our IT projects fail at ridiculous rates (not that the rest of the world necessarily has anything on us there). IT security is running in circles. I've become accustomed to such reports and have even considered that they represent a positive attempt to engage in critique and fix cycles necessary for the long-term improvement of such functions... but do they?

I get tired of the "we're doomed!" handwringing and the nostalgia for "the good old days" but the state of the economy speaks for itself. You have to wonder if perhaps Dilbert has been getting it right, and that instead of simply poking fun at captains of industry, Scott Adams is creating a simple historical record of incompetence of which we are now beginning to suffer the effects. I have taken it as a given that IT has little to worry about even during downturns; I know that people lose jobs and IT spending recedes, but at the same time I have never seen anyone truly competent go without work any longer than they have chosen to, and the need for automation and efficiency only increases in times of economic trouble: exactly the bromide which well-executed IT provides.

But what if our executives are as incompetent as recent performance suggests? What if the PHB is less satire and more reality? Is IT really a safe profession, and particularly is it safe in America? I am beginning to wonder.