Dog Eat Dog by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson

This is very true. But while on this topic, a risk I see is people seeing adoption of technology as the end rather than the facilitator. The IT solutions should support the organization and help the organization improve performance. The technology should not tie the organizations hands (as it can so easily do when implemented without an understanding of systems thinking, variation, process improvement, sub-optimization, psychology…). I believe in the value of in-house IT resources to create IT solutions that support the organization (rather than buying off the shelf solutions that end up making the organization conform to the software).

There are trade-offs that must be made (weighing the total costs of off the shelf solutions, customizable solutions and in house developed applications), but what I see is too much waste created through poor processes implemented in order to conform to software. Instead I think investing in some IT staff to help create IT solutions that aid the overall process improvement efforts would be wise. Often the best options are open source solutions that not only are cheap but normally much easier to customize and are easier to integrate with open architectures. And then have enough IT staff to do customization - I feel many organizations focus inordinately on shrinking the cost of IT staff. Instead they should focus on optimizing the overall system, even if that increase the costs of IT staff.

Granted I am biased having morphed into an IT person from my previous life as someone mainly focused on management improvement in general (but I did so specifically because of the great opportunity to improve performance through the proper adoption of information technology).

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