Life is full of intriguing paradoxes and none more so than the regular imbalance between IT investment and IT strategy. This is so widespread that I feel compelled to declare a new law of computing: Beveridge’s Law, which states that the financial investment in technology is inversely proportional to the organisation’s strategic planning effort.
Think particularly about how much effort your own department puts into genuinely strategic planning and see if you can recognise any glaring examples of inversely proportional costs due to lack of proper planning. I’ll be very pleased, but very surprised, if you can honestly give your outfit a clean bill of health on this problem.
But then IT strategy has always been the Cinderella of the organisation, with two particularly ugly sisters: cost and disappointment.
