I see lots of folks are referencing this post from Scoble. When I review the article, I think mostly of the “uninformed opinionater”, who likes to state opinion as fact.

In IT, I see the consistent problem of the modern businessperson, who had all of two semesters of data processing in their undergrad studies, has a Dell at home more powerful than the junk on their desktop, and hasn’t met a problem they can’t “solve” using Excel or (for the big ones) Access.

So, when corporate IT specs internal projects and surprises them with “big budgets”, what does it take to bridge the knowledge gap? How do you explain to folks about …

• ongoing cost of ownership – maintenance, license fees, etc.
• fault tolerance, even basic backup and restore
• scalability and multi-user issues

Wait a minute here – I’ m not complaining; heck, this is the fundamental job of corporate IT … to educate the business about Total Cost of Ownership and building Sustainable Systems. It’s just valuable to see / hear these resonating threads (ie. same church, different pew).