Carr, Citi and IT spending

Nicholas Carr is certainly a great writer but, he's a terrible mathematician. In his latest post, he mentions that Citi is going to cut IT spending by $4.6 billion over the next 3 years or as he states, find "...new opportunities to do more with less."

Nicholas, companies only get to do less with less. Given two activities and money for one, there are only two choices: do both activities half-baked or, fund only one. I actually think spending cuts like this are a good thing because it's basically the last ditch effort to force the business to make up it's mind about what features it can't live without and which ones are gravy. Wouldn't that be nice? We all know that IT spending is, to a large part, based on the business forecasts for growth and demand, and we all know how accurate those are!

On the other hand, we in IT really don't help the business make those hard decisions. We want to be nice and say yes to everything. Worse, we often say yes to the wrong thing. Just this morning I was in a meeting where we were evaluating options based on feature groups, and which features were most important. When I actually shut my mouth and really heard what the customer was saying, both their number one fear and number one need were not addressed by any of the requirements, directly. I brought this up which resulted in stunned silence. We re-arranged the spreadsheet and after a couple of minutes worth of back-of-the-envelope calculations, two of the six options just dropped off the map and a third is in serious jeopardy. Option number one isn't looking too credible, either.

Deliver what the IT customer needs, not what they want; a subtle difference with huge implications.