Having MBAs in charge of IT at every level is one of the stupidest business decisions that can be made, yet it’s consistently done.
It doesn’t rein in costs, which is the intent. It probably raises them.
Yet it’s the default.
IT obviously needs business oversight. But the way it’s done it hurts the business more than helps it.
How many times could I have spent $10,000 to save a million later in my IT career? A dozen? More?
But was shot down my some MBA.
And sometimes the savings would be in weeks or months, not the long term.
What substantive differences have you noticed between MBAS in charge of IT who have no IT training whatsoever, and MBAS who also have IT degrees and who have developed applications?
It really varies. The problem is that IT moves really fast, so MBAs who have IT experience in the real world often know only things that they learned in the 80s or early 90s and believe they fully apply today.
I had a boss who had an MIS degree from the early 90s and who later went back to get an MBA. She wasn’t a bad leader and we got along well, but she just could not understand virtualization which has now of course fully taken over the IT world. She just did not get it.
So it really hobbled the decision-making and modernization efforts of the IT department. It cost a lot of money, effort and time and the opportunity cost was enormous. Because running a bunch of old, slow balky physical servers (common in the 80s and 90s) is really vastly different than running a scalable, fully redundant and resilient virtualized environment.
So I don’t really know how to improve this. Having engineering/IT types in charge of IT is often no better. They have their own unique weaknesses and blindness to the business goals.
IT is just hard. There probably is no way to make it easy, as it changes more quickly than anyone can really fully learn it — so there are no actual experts most of the time, just some who are better than others for a little while.