Gartner was generous

There was a mini-tempest last week as Ken McGee of Gartner said IT is now a "non-growth" industry. Nick Carr jumped and said - see I told you so, IT doesn't matter. 

Flat growth, what wimps! One of my CIO clients recently told me he could cut 10% each year for the next few years and not skip a beat. He would use that to fund innovation investments and not have to go with tin-cup to his CFO. He has bought his ticket to New Florence.

Want 10,  20, 30% % savings in IT budgets? Here is a list I presented at Software 2006 of top 10 IT spend items with the most "empty calories"

• Software Vendor Annual Maintenance contracts

• Outsource contracts signed more than 18 months ago

• Software “shelfware”

• Telecom “shelfware” - unused  phone, T1 etc lines

• Lack of offshore shared services  across  client specific development centers

• Telecom “fringe” services – WI-FI hotspot charges, international mobile roaming etc

• Lack of “hardware as a service”

• Everything with cheaper building blocks - x86, open source, global labor - but finished product still pricey

• Staff aligned more with Accenture and EDS thinking than with 37Signals and Google

Delight your CFO and give him 5% back for a change - and still have plenty left for innovation projects. If that is non-growth, bring it on.

No Nick, it's not the end of corporate computing. It's the dawn of a new computing paradigm.

Update: I added a few words to clarify the categories

Further update: I was delighted to read this InfoWorld series of stories about "heroic hacks" - innovations and workarounds from creative IT staff. Every CIO deserves a few - or many - such heroes.