What? "Information Technology", you say? Yes, that's the usual answer. Let me propose another version that I picked up from Jeremy Miller's recent blog entry.

IT should stand for Intellectual Toolbox

Over the past decade, we've seen a constant stream of CIOs repeating the mantra about standardizing and commoditizing IT for cost savings, effective service delivery, economies of scale, and whatever the latest buzzword combination happened to be.

The sad thing about this is that standardization and commoditization are not some kind of absolute evils. Standardization is a good thing for the industry. Commoditization is a necessity for economies to elevate to new levels of productivity. The problem was--and still is--that many of the same CIOs have used standardization and commoditization to optimize locally on their own turf while global productivity plummets.

CIOs should see IT as an enabler, not a mere service provider. Yes, IT has absolutely zero value outside of the context of supporting a business need. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't make the most out of our IT capabilities, does it?

By looking at IT as our corporate intellectual toolbox, we can support business on their terms and cut off the fat that is very present in many of today's large enterprise IT departments. The policy you have about only running IBM WebSphere 8.0.2 and Oracle 14f, screw that policy. It has absolutely nothing to do with your corporation's bottom line. It might have a lot to do with the IT department's internal bottom line but that's a whole lot different from the whole organization's best interest.

How long has it been since your company's IT department has asked business how they'd like to operate with IT? How long has it been since business stopped asking IT after learning they don't have a say on how to best implement corporate strategy that happens to need a new IT solution?

Someone posted a link to this haiku at Jerry Weinberg's website to our intranet.
Hilarious. And oh so true.