By Matt Asay
For a long time, the IT department was viewed by executives as a cost center that devoured an unacceptable amount of time and money—and outsourcing was viewed as the solution. However, it’s become clear that IT matters now more than ever … and it needs to stay in-house to stay secure and effective.
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Matt Asay writes, “Thirteen years ago Nick Carr published a seminal article in Harvard Business Review arguing that IT doesn’t matter. As the thinking went, enterprise IT spent far too much time and money rebuilding the same applications and infrastructure that was essentially commoditized. The rise of cloud computing and open source seemed to confirm his suspicions, leading many to conclude that outsourcing was the right way to minimize investments in such commodity code.
“Those people were wrong.
“As Redmonk analyst James Governor correctly argued a year ago, ‘Cloud is of course itself a form of outsourcing, but one that allows for speed of delivery, and encourages reshoring of skills. But people and process changes are needed to do the work.’ Those people who make an ever-bigger impact on an enterprise’s ability to differentiate and compete are developers, and outsourcing them was one of the worst ideas ever conceived.”
