Comment Diversity and Value (Score 2) 265
The first, diversity, was mentioned in the article. In the last 20 years (1990 to 2010) we've had countless "core enterprise technologies of the future" spring forth. Some of these concepts or technologies are still in wide spread use, but others have fallen out of favor or have been overcome by events. Many shops have hodge-podge systems with tough to find skill sets. It's hard to staff these positions and the average tenure of an IT person is about 2 years. With a contractor, it's now the HR problem, not your problem, to find someone who knows Delphi, COM, and DB2 to patch your in house app.
By contrast, the CICS was developed in 1969, System 360 1964, and COBOL 1959?. Anyway, you can take a 30 year period from the mid sixties to the mid 1990's and find almost the exact same mix of products. The versions and features evolved, and some additional COTS products were introduced, but there is an amazing consistency. Even the terminal technology for the mainframe was fairly slow to change, with serial terminals in wide spread use until fairly recently. I think the lack of diversity makes it more economical for companies to train and manage an in-house staff. When it's time to find new staff, you used to be able to find an ample supply of people who had COBOL/CICS on their resume.
But I think this problem could be overcome if senior management saw their IT as delivering a competitive advantage relative to their competitors. Even in the mainframe days there was a lot of outsourcing. If we're all using the same COTS packages and building the same applications on the same platforms, it's more about not screwing up than it is about doing something excellent. Companies are more likely to keep their "secret sauce" in house but take the stuff everyone has to do and outsource it to try to reduce cost. That's not to say that companies don't use consultants to help with projects.
You sometimes see this as "know your knitting," meaning understand what makes your company great, it's core competencies and what makes it special. Don't get distracted by the other stuff and just focus on that. If IT isn't something that makes your company special - why would you spend one nickel more than you had to?