Back on April 27th I wrote an article, The scope of IT’s responsibility when businesses go bad, that was inspired by a thread that Patrick Gray had started on the LinkedIn.com Chief Information Officer (CIO) Network group. This was entitled Is IT partially to blame for the financial crisis? (as ever you need to be a member of LinkedIn.com and the group to view these links).

Since then, there have been nearly 80 comments made by a wide variety of people, with an equally wide range of opinions. As can often happen in on-line discussions, positions were taken, attitudes were hardened and eventually some sort of stalemate was reached; probably as the protagonists were too weary to fight any more. In this respect seasoned IT professionals can be no different to teenagers discussing the merits of different genres of music! I certainly employed my method acting approach at a new level on this thread.

As a result of the overall feedback, Patrick has now composed a blog article on TechRepublic.com, an outlet that has also featured one of my favourite technology writers, Ilya Bogorad (see this earlier blog post). Patrick’s piece is titled Why taking a few punches on the financial crisis just might save IT and takes a thought-provoking stance with respect to the comments that his thread engendered. Here are the introductory remarks:

Patrick Gray believes that IT leaders still looking to find a seat at the C-level table might gain that influential position by taking a share of the responsibility for the failures that led to financial crisis.

It is certainly worth reading this article, but I recommend that you do so with an open mind.





Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology. Prevoyance Group provides strategic IT consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies. Patrick can be reached at patrick.gray@prevoyancegroup.com.

