A Sense of Glamour

What do you tell someone with a couple of thousand crores to spend on IT and

is looking for a consultant who can tell him which solution to choose?

No, I am not cooking this up. This is a real story, of an Indian organization

in the present timeframe. Obviously, I cannot disclose the name of the

individual or the organization. But that is not the point. While this one is at

an extreme end in terms of scale, this is by no means an isolated incident.

Corporate India and small business India and Government India are all on the

look out for good advisors who can tell them what to choose and will stand by to

hand hold them through the implementation.

Krishna Kumar, Editor

When I probed a bit into the above case, what came up was not really

surprising. The issue was not that they did not know what to do. Rather, they

were clear what they wanted. Only they were not sure that the solution(s) being

touted would deliver what exactly was being asked for, or was being promised.

Hence the hunt for a consultant.

And this is the same problem that hundreds of CIOs and CEOs and line managers

face when taking IT decisions.

Think for a minute. Isn't this similar to the decisions any CXO would have

to take while investing money into, say plant and machinery? Or into a new

product launch or a new marketing campaign? What do they do then? Don't they

get in consultants for helping them with these decisions?



Why is it then, that a similar decision process is being touted as too complex
only when it comes to IT?

At the beginning of my career, I used to work with oilseed extraction plants.

When we needed to design a new plant, we used to get in an external consultant,

and the final work used to be contracted out to a competent contractor. Oilseeds

extraction is a mature business, having been around for a long time. So the

processes there are more set when compared to IT. But the decision processes

were no less complex or less time consuming. And the jargon was there too.

Perhaps the only difference was that the business was not as glamorized as IT is

being glamorized.

And that is the problem with IT. An aura has been built around IT that makes

many people think that they cannot do it. Perhaps this glamorization of IT is at

the root of many of the problems organizations big and small face when it comes

to IT implementation. If you cannot design a rocket, do not expect the rocket

scientist to understand CRM implementation. As the IT industry matures, we will

have to consciously do with less and less of this glamour quotient and get real

with the rest of the world.