For a long time CIO’s and other IT folk have been forced to start pushing the business benefits of changes. This is a good thing. We need to focus more on the benefits of doing IT than on the costs.

BUT… There is always a BUT.

Yesterday a colleague asked advice for an organisation that’s moving into open-source and is looking to the next step. (We at Qhuba believe in a very slow - but sure - move to open source).

They are looking to justify the next step. Of course there are the obvious items such as reduced license costs, but to truly sell it to the business they are looking for the ‘business case’. So the question arises: What is in IT for the business?

Well, painfully, not very much. At best you hope - like with any migration - that the business will just keep on running after you’re done. After all, new IT tools are just that - tools. They do not trigger the step-changes that can be made if someone truly improves a business process.
These tools are no doubt essential to many of those changes, but they are not the catalyst.

The best you can hope for is landing up with much of the same. Any benefits such as end-user productivity and reduced TCO have been achieved many years ago. All we can focus on when doing projects around the bread-and-butter IT services is reduction in cost or effort from the IT department.

An that kind of brings back the world of “what’s in it for me, the CIO”.

We’ve been longing to stay away from that world, and now the only way we can justify the benefits are by again turning the focus on our own (IT) cost and reducing them.

This in itself though should be the wake-up call for CIO’s. If there is no further gain to be had on the business side - we should call it a day with IT improvements in those areas, and just stop doing IT there altogether.

Yes - stop doing IT in those areas. Just like most large companies have stopped producing the majority of their energy themselves, so we need to stop producing our own ‘bread-and-butter’ IT services ourselves.

If you’ve landed up asking youreself: “What’s in IT for me?”, by all means go ahead and take the next step - just make sure it’s the last one you force yourself to take - give it up to some SAAS provider, or find another solution altogether.