IT is not just Overhead

I remember well the Peter Drucker article about corporate overhead mentioned below. I was lucky to have worked at Procter & Gamble under several CIOs that strongly believed that information technologies were transformational. After the Internet, the Web and the emergence of fast,mobile and very powerful computers to solve difficult problems, it hardly seems necessary to repeat the argument, but here it is in Computerworld, read all of it:

Opinion: IT is not the mailroom
By Paul M. Ingevaldson
Computerworld - In 1989, Peter Drucker penned a famous article for The Wall Street Journal titled "Sell the Mailroom." In it, he made the case for shedding those elements of your business that "do not make a direct and measurable contribution to the bottom line." These he listed as "clerical, maintenance and support work." Drucker argued that such departments would have a much better chance of improving their productivity if they were part of an organization whose job it was to do that kind of work. If those departments stayed in-house, he wrote, the people working in them would have "little incentive to improve their productivity." .... '