A Joe Torre moment

Last night between watching the Yankees lose to the Indians and the Cowboys beat the Bills, I was perusing blogs I had missed in the last couple of weeks of travel.  I saw courtesy of Ross Mayfield this Chris Anderson (of Wired magazine and Long Tail fame) talk at the Microsoft Global CIO Summit.

Chris takes CIOs to task for not aggressively adopting consumer technologies. And it struck me the average CIO is like Joe Torre. Or Wade Phillips of the Cowboys. Under constant scrutiny. And frequent firings. In other places, folks like Nick Carr beat up on CIOs for not aggressively adopting utility computing. And on and on.  Everybody has a Monday morning quarterback solution.

The reality as I have written before is 80-85% of most IT budgets are spent with large technology vendors. Most CIOs actually face what Chris calls "abundance of IT" while finding themselves with strapped budgets.

As Alex Rodriguez said at the end of the game "It's not Joe's fault....As players, it falls on us. You can point the finger at whoever you want, the bottom line is we didn't get the job done.''

I wish Chris had the guts to ask Microsoft at its conference how much value it delivers to CIOs for the $ 20 billion it charges them each year. How much of IT time and effort is spent applying patches and bugs to keep Windows and IE and Office protected. Why Microsoft has itself been slow to roll out consumer and SaaS technologies to the enterprise.  I wish  Nick would ask IBM why years after talking about on-demand it still is reluctant to deliver utility computing economics. I wish Verizon like Alex had the guts to say "We did not perform. Instead of suing startups like Vonage for VoIP patents we should have been aggressively rolling out VoIP and Skype like features and pricing to our customers".

George Steinbrenner and Jerry Jones and every corporate CEO pay top dollar and have every right to expect the best. So fire Joe. Fire Wade when he stumbles. Fire the CIO. But till the larger vendors and players perform for the huge moneys they expect there cannot be champagne and celebration.