It's like someone's reading my mind:
According to a multiyear study of over 400 companies by MIT researchers Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill and David Robertson,3 IT departments tend not to be innovative leaders within organizations, but rather conservative forces, viewed by business executives as cost sinks and liabilities. In many companies, it takes the IT department one to two years to implement a new strategic initiative — hardly the agility companies are striving for. The research shows the typical IT structure is so dense and extensive that it’s often a miracle that it works at all. The researchers observe: “Legacy systems cobbled together to respond to each new business initiative create rigidity and excessive costs. Every change becomes a risky, expensive venture.”
The Proliferation of Complexity
How did this happen? James Cordata, who has written extensively about the information economy, points out that as work became more complex and specialized over the 20th century, the use of data — numbers and facts — as fodder for more and more analysis and fact-based decision making intensified. And digital technology “was perfect for this kind of world.”4 Of course, digital technology not only supported that complexity but also played a large part in actually creating it, weaving a continuous web of unending data. “More computers are better than fewer” remains a key belief of American business, Cordata says. “There are no limits to how much is good.” Management became accustomed to the idea that buying more computers and more software would continue to cut costs and improve operations.
http://evora.mit.edu/smr/issue/2007/fall/01/
