RSSWhy conventional wisdom always sounds good
If you're getting the idea from all this cloud/outsourcing/agile jibber-jabber that IT as you knew it is screwed, Vinnie Mirchandani helpfully points out six ways this is happening from the other side of the fence… maybe all the same deep, dark reasons you have been harboring through the long sleepless nights lately as you've laid awake pondering your future as a CIO. The interesting thing to me, and perhaps a more common perspective that I should address more in my own writing on these subjects, is how Mirchandani and others allow these facts to take on such a negative, and indeed inescapable, cast. The facts being discussed are undisputed; the conclusions as to their implications are simply conventional wisdom. Ironically, the subject is supposed to be innovation.
We are dangerously dependent in IT on an external supply chain
Sure; just as we are dangerously dependent in electricity on an external supply chain, or transportation infrastructure, or a thousand other things. External supply chains are only dangerous, or I should say unacceptably dangerous, if your organization has the resources to cost-effectively replace them internally. You can't do that with electricity in the modern era, though it once was possible (and may become so again); you are coming to a point where you won't be able to do it with IT, either. It's only a catastrophe if you choose to look at it that way.
The IT buyer-vendor equilibrium is way off kilter
There is a bit more truth to this, but Mirchandani takes as given some things that are well within the buyer's control, and overlooks some things that have become, once again, conventional wisdom, but that make little sense in today's IT environment. The rapid upgrade cycle in IT makes this factor far less static than is implied, and the fact that, if they were able to pull their heads out of the sand, buyers might realize that the cycle itself is entirely within their control and that software does not degrade and hardware, much less services, do so far more gradually than is generally credited.
The bigger IT vendors have not been innovating much
Nor have they ever; although corporate R&D budgets may indeed have shrunk, real innovation in the industry has traditionally come from small upstarts, which may or may not be acquired by the bigger players, and their ranks are swelling as some of the same factors mentioned elsewhere in the post decrease their startup costs.
I have no bones to pick with Mirchandani's last two points, that IT is not often strategic and that CIOs are more focused on compliance than innovation, but on the other hand, those may not be conventional wisdom. Certainly CIOs would prefer not to think so. And that may be why those things don't sound good to you right now. Conventional wisdom is comforting.
