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Comparing IT services to office furniture is a joke. Some IT services are fairly ubiquitous...email, for example. Others are not and never will be. I've done work for close to 500 manufacturing companies in my career. The software requirements for running the manufacturing portion of their business, including ERP/MRP, were all over the place. No two ran their business the same. Every single one had at least one programmer, some many, whose sole job was to take shrink-wrapped software and modify it to work for how they did business. They had their own staff because the cost of hiring an outside firm to manage all these changes would be cost-prohibitive. It all boils down to ROI. In the future there will certainly be ROI gains in outsourcing parts of the IT infrastructure. Conversely, there will always be ROI losses for outsourcing others and business will always avoid those losses wherever possible. That means that internal IT is here to stay. The days of big ERP will outlast me, Jason Bloomberg and anyone else so long as there are computer systems in the workplace. It's time Mr. Bloomberg set aside the bong and join us in the real world.
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