Fortune: IT Won’t Support iPhone
December 14, 2007 | By Raymond T. Hightower
Fortune Magazine lists the Top 10 Reasons Why IT Won’t Support the iPhone. Experts, including those of us in IT, are always getting in the way of progress.
Entrenched Experts
What is it about human experts? Experts in every profession tend to stand in the way of progress. Experts cling to the status quo, perhaps because expert status is defined by the status quo. Change the world, and an expert might not be an expert any more.
Drastic Change Confounds Experts
Experts are great at predicting the future when things are stable and unchanging. But in the face of drastic change, experts are often wrong. A few examples…
- Experts said for centuries that human flight was impossible. It took a couple of non-expert bicycle mechanics to build a practical airplane.
- Expert physicists said (in the 1950s) that putting a man on the moon would take over two hundred years of study and analysis and blah blah blah. The outsiders at NASA proved them wrong in 1969.
- Now the folks at NASA are the experts. Soon they’ll be displaced by a new crew of outsiders
IT Must Serve Business Goals
The online article received over 100 comments within hours of publication. Wellington Souza, VP of IT at HighPoint University, breaks it down in a short, direct response:The IT industry has completely lost focus on it purpose. If your users want to use a device, change your infrastructure to accomodate it. What is your purpose?
Brief and powerful. Information technology must serve business goals.