IT is right to whine

Over at Tech Republic, Patrick Gray has stirred a hornet's nest calling IT a bunch of whiners. Shades of Nick Carr's IT does not matter. And threatens IT will get outsourced if it does not shape up.

I have three reactions:

a) How much more can you outsource? As I have written many times before, most IT shops are 80 to 90% already outsourced - outsourcing not just to EDS or Infosys but spend on external hardware, software, outsourcing and telecom vendors as a percent of IT budget. For all their scale, vendors have not consistently shown they can deliver technology cheaper or better than internal staff. It is time to bring some of that external spend back in-house, not even think about more outsourcing.

b) If you are going to beat up on IT, beat up 6 to 7X times on vendors in proportion to the internal to external spend. IT takes blame for Microsoft's bugs, Accenture's SLA based downtime, for SAP's ugly UI, for ATT's patchy 3G coverage...everything. The average vendor spends 5% of revenues on R&D. If you want to blame IT for lack of innovation beat up on Oracle and Verizon for spending way more on SG&A than R&D. And those billions of marketing dollars crowd out the few critical voices there are out there.

c) IT has an almost impossible job - balancing innovation, keeping lights on, compliance and security. Most deliver a lot for 1 to 2% of revenue. Find me any other domain in the executive suite with that much stress, which outsources 80 to 90% of its departmental spend, has that much enterprise-wide impact and that much rapid change in its tools.

Faced with unsympathetic comments from the likes of Patrick, IT is absolutely justified in whining...unfortunately, unlike vendors it has zero marketing dollars to make its case.