Uneven Distribution of IT Talent or Expectation?

Once upon a time, I wrote a book about IT management. This was something of a vanity project: I got some stuff off my chest and then I felt better. (This was before blogs, which are much better suited for venting.)

Since I have a side business publishing books, this vanity project at least had some practical value: we debugged the process with my vanity project before moving on to other projects.

However it came to be, I was struck by the reaction to my book: the few people who read it fall neatly into one of two camps:

1. This book is useless: it describes solutions to management problems that no one has because no IT environment is this bad.
   
2. This book is a much-needed guide to the horror that is current American corporate IT.

This bifurcated reaction raises a question, regardless of my book per se: is IT talent massively unevenly distributed, or does expectation or understanding of IT performance vary massively from organization to organization?

I have not been able to make much headway answering this question: many of the people I have surveyed are MBAs who seem both confident in their ability to assess IT and greatly lacking in actual ability to assess IT at a fundamental level.

On the other hand, since IT management is increasingly about pleasing MBAs,  perhaps I just out of date about what constitutes IT competence.

In my consulting practice, we see a wide range of IT competence with a strong bias toward low competence. So I am inclined to believe that talent is vastly unevenly distributed. But why would that be? Is financial and accounting talent similarly unevenly distributed?

Many colleagues have pointed out to me that this bias in my observation is to be expected: we are consulting firm, after all, and only incompetent organizations need our services.

I am not a big fan of this idea: I maintain that rational, competent IT organizations can choose to outsource specific jobs for any or all of the following reasons:

1. There is not enough time to acquire the expertise in-house.
2. This is a pilot project with an uncertain future.
3. You are not a development shop and cannot find an off-the-shelf solution.

In the past, we have done project with companies internationally recognized for their excellence, so I dispute the notion that only weak organizations consume IT consulting, even though there is some of that.

My quest continues: someday I may know if the talent or the expectation is what varies so greatly from organization to organization.