Are IT departments becoming big bags of contracts? Jerry Gregoire, former CIO for Dell and PepsiCo, writes in this month's CIO magazine about the vanishing IT department. He concludes:

So, what kind of IT organization do you aspire to have? If you yearn for adequate results on vanilla systems in pursuit of dial-tone regularity, forget about talent shortages and go find yourself a good contract lawyer. If, on the other hand, you still believe IT can make a competitive difference and that even the more mundane tasks can be a channel of competitive advantage given a little creative effort, then developing and retaining a professional organization should be your number-one goal.

From The Vanishing IT Department - Peer To Peer - CIO Magazine Jun 1,2004
Referenced Tue Jun 08 2004 16:51:48 GMT-0600

Jerry also argues against the increasing trend of appointing people with weak technical skills as CIO:

Consider for a moment that, given an hour or two of reading an instruction manual and a few hours looking over a dentist's shoulder, I could probably do a passable job of pulling teeth. So why doesn't that make me a dentist? Well, because I'd be helpless if anything went wrong during the extraction, and since pulling teeth is the only thing I know how to do, a pulled tooth is exactly what every patient who comes through my door is going to get. CIOs with no formal training or long-term experience in IT are not CIOs. They're just very nice people from other disciplines sent in to make sure IT doesn't do anything dangerous or exciting. The same goes for the rest of the IT leadership.

From The Vanishing IT Department - Peer To Peer - CIO Magazine Jun 1,2004
Referenced Tue Jun 08 2004 16:55:02 GMT-0600