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.