The IT circus has just left town

The IT dream of moving from being an overhead to being a profit centre is all but dead, argues Guy Matthews.

Recent headlines just make you want to hold your head and weep. The fact is, industry is no longer investing in IT for competitive advantage.

Figuring out why this is the case is the game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey that IT experts from all backgrounds are trying to win.

My tip is that it will come down to the problem of the 'information technology' sector being identified with the 'technology' part. No major surprise there. But the real issue is: what is being proposed as the solution?

Business today is processing and storing more information than ever before. But no end-users are interested in how we can take this information and turn it into something that is going to help the business make money.

The IT dream of moving from being an overhead to being a profit centre is all but dead. The stay at the boardroom table was brief and not very fruitful, and IT is now back down the food chain.

IT's strategic importance to survival and growth is now stuck down there with catering and car park management. Although few people inside the industry are actually saying it, this is the tacit admission.

And who is to blame? The customers obviously must take their share. Sorry. For a moment there I just drifted back to the days when people actually listened to management consultants.

No, a huge portion of blame must go to the people who lead the industry, the people who are paid vast sums to actually give this travelling circus a sense of direction.

Instead, as ever, like the clowns in Disney's Dumbo, they are too busy dousing each other in water and performing other acts of slapstick (Oracle and PeopleSoft) to be too concerned with the fact that the audience has gone home.

And what is particularly disheartening is that even the 'new' answers are starting to sound depressingly familiar.

According to IBM - still the world's largest IT firm, at least according to its own accounts - the next era of IT will be based on integration: integration of wasteful systems; integration of processes; integration of technology systems that currently serve different business processes to drive out infrastructure inefficiencies. Sounds like services to me.

Anyone know a good management consultant? I need to integrate some jargon.