Even after fifty years of Information Technology, ours is still a relatively immature business function that continues to create more and more management opportunities; without exploiting the perceived wisdom and body of best practice, a heritage generally available to other more mature professions.
As a result, we are all prone to make mistakes and business decisions that we later regret, such is human fallibility and we are after all human, despite our collective reputation for nerdishness.
The trick, of course, is not to repeat our past mistakes but to learn from our experience and to improve our performance in the future. We seem to be able to do this in most areas of our lives but it is an uphill struggle when it comes to managing technology.
Our profession does seem to be particularly reluctant to share and learn from common experience. I am frequently quite simply staggered how many times we individually appear to need to re-invent the wheels of management. Perhaps this will eventually dissipate with growing individual and functional maturity? Perhaps not.
Unless we seriously begin to take this bull by the horns, we will probably continue to muddle along as we do now, each of us ploughing our separate furrow, with our personal and collective commercial credibility at risk, as we try to arrive independently at a resolution that others have already successfully reached.
