Here we are then, on the precipice of a glorious, brave new world—a wired world where information is available in the blink of an eye. Companies can serve their customers with previously unimagined levels of sophistication all the time, any time.

How is this possible? IT makes this possible. Once upon a time IT was some bloke who had a PC at home. He knew more than anybody else in the company did because he spent his spare time fiddling about on one. IT departments were seat of the pants stuff, making it up as you went along.

IT has advanced tremendously in the last few years; with IT projects becoming more ambitious, more complex and more technical. So if IT has moved into the 21st century, how come senior management looks upon IT like it is still stuck in the 1980s? There are still plenty of people out there with a PC in the bedroom and an ambitious career before them and there are plenty of people who will employ them because they are cheap. But is this an appropriate course of action for business, which is dependent on IT for its very function?

With this dependency comes the realisation that they cannot provide the customer with service or product without it. Yet many companies are striving forward with increasingly technical IT projects but do not have the staff or the knowledge base to support these projects internally. I know of many IT professionals who have not been on a training course in years, yet they're expected to support behemoth projects of a complexity never before seen. Novell administrators suddenly find themselves looking at NT workstations, SQL servers, a Unix server and maybe a bit of wireless technology thrown in, not to mention all the software they are expected to have an intimate knowledge of.

We live in an age where everything depends on data flow. The "hows" and "whys" vary but what is common is that companies are increasingly opting for technical, flexible and demanding IT systems without having the experience or the staff to deal effectively with them. A new computer system does not cure all your problems, it just generates a set of new ones, and these new problems are not being addressed. The result is that either the project fails and costs massive amounts of money or, more commonly, the staff leaves from lack of pay, training, respect, consultation and consideration. The company can then only attract hopefuls into the IT department due to the level of salary they are offering; the person who has left has also taken all the in-house experience with them. Then the project stumbles from one crisis to another—if it survives at all—customers get fed up, contracts are not renewed, senior management moves on in a flurry of bank notes. This emerging pattern is only going to increase if we continue with this same mentality.

The mentality of IT staff on the cheap runs through both public and private corporations. I can site two examples. One is the NHS, where IT staff are not even recognised as being anything other than clerical or admin staff; consequently, they get the same rate of pay as secretaries and clerks. The NHS could not function without IT. All pathology labs are utterly dependent on IT systems; blood transfusion departments are utterly dependent on IT systems. Without IT the hospital ceases to operate and people die. Is it really appropriate then to be looking for IT staff who can cope with Novell, NT, Unix, SQL, Web development, project management, hardware and software support, as well as user training, all within the same working day and then pay them the same as clerical grades? Example number two involves an IT outsourcing company who 'abused' their staff so much that 80 percent of them resigned over a three-month period. Net result is that they could not fulfil their service level agreements and the customer(s) walked away. They lost their biggest contract and the company held on to existence by sheer luck and in a much-reduced form.

As the complexity of IT increases and the in-house people do not have the knowledge base to cope, companies become more reliant on the supplier for support. Suppliers are notoriously poor at providing support for exorbitant prices. A false economy looms. The organisation needs to ask itself if the benefit of the new IT systems to their function and customers outweighs the problems they are heading for? Come the revolution and they cannot satisfy the expectations of their customers for instant access and data, they will find themselves up against the wall with a very grim future ahead of them indeed. Come the revolution and our e-society may be more fragile than we imagined.

Copyright © 2002 Raikes Hodson. All Rights Reserved.

Raikes Hodson lives in the NorthWest England. He is a part-time archaeologist & ancient historian. Writes for fun. Lives with girlfriend, 4 cats, 3 horses. Has a taste for the dark side.