IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

1.5. The free lunch trap

In parallel to the above, organizations fell into another trap concerning the economics of supply and demand, and trying to establish who the payer for all these new systems would be. In the beginning, the regulation of supply and demand was not a big issue because the technology was so expensive and clunky, and the concept of computers in the enterprise so new anyway, that its initial use was limited to things like accounting and payroll.

However, as computer technology progressed and became more affordable, corporate IT became more heterogeneous, with mainframes in the 1960s being joined by minicomputers in the 1970s. Departmental IT became possible, with cheaper minicomputers beginning to take root and software vendors appearing, thus increasing the options available to the business. By the time we get to the 1980s, decentralization was in full swing and the first wave of – often evangelical – microcomputer users started sensing that their time had come.

With this evolution from the sixties to the eighties came vastly increased possibilities for the use of information technology, and the initial driver for developing systems moved from mere cost savings to increasing revenue and even competitive differentiation. In short, more and more parts of the business were beginning to ask for more and more things from IT.

The upshot of all this was the inversion of the supply and demand curves, i.e. the demand for IT products and services had by now significantly ...