Newsflash: Businesses are not run by IT departments Monday, June 04, 2007
Hugh Macleod, who is an excellent bloke, blogger and mate, is an astute observer of many things and a great cartoonist. This is one of my favs of his:
Labels: humour
posted by John Wilson @ 8:12 PM Permanent Link
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3 Comments:
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At 11:13 AM,
Hawkeye said...
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I do agree that business are (or should be) run by people who hire and fire IT departments, the idea being that IT is a service department for the business and not its prime reason for being. Of course in a software development company this is not necessarily the case. However what does bother me is that those who do run businesses seem to predominantly be accountants whose prime qualification seems to be that they can count. While managing the money is a key to a succesful business it is a useless skill if you can't do anything else but count it. Too many accountants are in fact incapable of doing more than the counting and they are the ones who think that the way to a profitable business is to cut costs, usually by firing IT departments. Clearly if revenue is x and costs are 0.5 x then the most you can increase profits by cutting costs is to cut down on the 0.5x, but you cannot reduce costs to zero and the only real way to grow profits is to increase revenue without costs shooting out of control. The former method is a short term gain with no real plan for growth, but is often the one chosen by people running businesses and they do so precisely because they are natural counters rather than entrepreneurs.
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At 9:28 AM,
John Wilson said...
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Ah, but we accountants know how to goad/provoke the IT dept into commenting - GOTCHA
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At 11:32 AM,
Hawkeye said...
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I don't think it need an accountant's skill (sic) to provoke the comment on my part and I was aware I was opening myself up to this. I will say that it was a generalisation and there are a few (a very few) accountants who do not match the generalisation in my comment.
