

8 Business Misconceptions about IT - smanek
http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/jun2008/ca2008064_652958.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories

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edw519
These 8 items are NOT what's wrong with IT in your organization.

They are a barometer of how well your organization uses IT as a competitive
weapon.

If you run an organization with any of these _signals_ , don't blame IT, blame
yourself. And fix it fast. Your competitors already have.

~~~
eugenejen
One interesting question is how non-IT people uses IT for competitive
advantage. If non-IT people doesn't know what IT is doing and IT likes to keep
the veil from them. Then how can non-IT people uses something when they knows
nothing about it?

If people like us was thrown a programming problem requires us to use a new
programming language and we are interested in. We will start to play around
both and try to understand them. Then maybe an idea came up so we just
leverage what we learned from playing around to solve the problem.

So for us, we learned from our very beginning to play around things to
"understand" the problem and learn how to tweak something. I understand
successful business people also learn from trials and errors. But probably
most mediocre IT and non-IT people both lack such aptitude.

~~~
edw519
"Then how can non-IT people uses something when they knows nothing about it?"

From their customers. Especially the ones they're losing.

Do you think that everyone suddenly just had a website one day?

Here's more likely what happened...

"Hey Joe, you haven't placed an order with us this month. Anything wrong?"

"Sorry Fred, but we've switched to XYZ Company for our widgets. I meant to
tell you but I forgot. They have a website on the internet that lets us
automatically configure our widgets specifically for our customers. Our
purchasing people love it. They'd rather use it than calling your 800 number."

A simple example, but the same story plays out all day long all over the world
in all kinds of technologies.

It's management's job to stay on top of this and insist on what they need. Or,
as they say, they're toast.

