Basically once you decentralize IT and use internal competition to determine the best IT practices for business, who supports it? Who guarantees that corporate secrets stay secret?
While I am not a hater of the idea of distributed IT, I think the support costs will climb through the roof. Instead of having a lean support staff trained in your business, you will have to either hire super-brains who can master everything or hire a huge staff with sections specialized in certain areas.
Plus there is a cost with new purchases. Who is going to pay for 5 different spread sheet programs when one does most of the work? Who is going to pay for 7 different client management software solutions? How do you get these different solutions to talk to one another? Sometimes the accounts payable department really does need access to account information generated by the sales department. A sales person sells your companies product, someone delivers the product, then someone else charges the customer. Even in this simple example you have three different offices handling essential business functions. Somebody has to make sure the sales data gets to the delivery department (even if you are delivering software over an Internet connection, unless the sales person handles that transaction, it will probably be handled by someone else in another department). Once proof of delivery is made, it is very important for a company to get paid for it's product so the deliver data needs to talk to the accounts payable department.
That kind of system architecture is hard when everyone is on the same page. Add in all different kinds of software and you increase the complexity by orders of magnitude.
Now this type of support and system's architecture can be accomplished but it will be very very very very very expensive both to set up and maintain.
Discussion on:
Message 6 of 1
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox
