Andrea DiMaio

An article this morning made me reflect on how predicting the role of IT with the new administration is far from being trivial. Many take Obama’s campaign as an example of how sensitive he is to the role of technology and infer that he will keep technology spending up. The counterargument is that other more immediate priorities – such as the economic downturn and the financial crisis – will grab most of his attention.

I guess it is too early to say what he and his administration will do. And this is not the place for political speculation and gossiping. What we should think about is why we have doubts that IT will rank very high in his priorities. Should we ask ourselves again the question “Does IT Matter”?

Actually, we all thought it did. After the dot.com bust and the post 9/11 recession, a good part of the economic growth has been attributed to technology. All the money spent (wasted?) doing Y2K and early e-commerce had helped renew IT assets and prepare for a much greater contribution of technology to growth. Well, it is also true that these days we are experiencing the pros and cons of economies, markets and companies being connected in real-time.

And what about IT in government? Of course we’ve had almost a decade of e-government, several years of citizen-centricity and transformation. We can see and touch  technology that has permeated so many government services and business processes.

Yet, why do we keep getting questions about how to prove the value of IT? Why are several clients realizing that, while they need to modernize 15 to 20+ year old mission critical applications, they have been developing a new breed of legacy systems through a multitude of web applications?  Why those very few successful IT-intensive transformation efforts haven’t but created new – albeit apparently more citizen-centric – silos that is almost as difficult to take to the next level as it was to break their predecessors a few years ago?

It is time for IT executives in government to ask themselves a different question: “Did IT matter, and will it?”.