SteveJ-restore-test

Prior Related Posts: Quantifying the Business Benefits of I.T. Operations The Triple Whammy - the true cost of I.T. Waste Force Multipliers - Tools as Physical and Cognitive Amplifiers I.T. in context Alan Kohler and Robert Gottleibsen have been writing in "Business Spectator" about the relationship between jobs and Economic Productivity. They note that the USA has improved productivity in the last year while in Australia it has declined (+4% and -3% respectively).  My take on this is: a gross Failure of Australian Management. There is solid research/evidence that "ICT" is the single largest contributor to both partial and multi-factor Productivity, and is expected to be so for the next 20 years.  This is an big issue. Kohler ties this back to a Telstra survey , now in its second year. The 2009 ACIL Tasman whitepaper notes: While investment in ICT has boosted the productivity of workers, Australian firms, industries and the national economy, productivity levels in ...

Background There's a report around at the moment that says spending on I.T. is 3-4 times more effective than anything else. [Link to come] In the first couple of decades of commercial computing, all the "low hanging fruit" - the best returns - for I.T. were exploited. That's when 'the books', financial information and large internal databases (assets, employees, stockholders, vendors, customers, ...) were computerised. 1991 - the first IT recession - marked the end of this era. For the first time, IT staff were laid off in an economic downturn. Previously other staff could be displaced by automating their jobs with I.T. The 2000 I.T. recession - which we are only just starting to recover from - was industry backlash (and rightfully so) to "Y2K" and the "Dotcom Bust"). The general I.T. justification before then was: "We need this, trust us". After 2000, business needed to be convinced... The Triple Whammy The Triple Whammy of was...

Here's the deal: Commercial I.T. is generally poorly done - if only because it can't be proven otherwise. It's been that way for 50 years. Many people have attempted to define, measure and address these endemic problems - with very limited success. There are simple remedies, but the people who 'write the cheques' aren't implementing them. What's Going On? The problems with I.T. are not technical, nor within the industry. [It's not a 'profession' under any definition.] Something else is going on: it's outside I.T. - the "meta-level" - the people that employ and manage us... And it's been very consistent over time - provably for more than 40 yeras. And it's cross-cultural - every country was affected by "Y2K". It was foreseeable, completely avoidable, and at no additional cost, if remediation had been generally started around 1992. [There have been many, many "Clock Roll-overs" in the history of computin...