Engineers aren't in charge, anywhere, other than tech companies.
Empirically speaking, a lot of the guys who graduated with their B.Sc. in computer science with me saw their career paths as joining a big consulting company, working on the front lines for a couple of years and then getting into management and leaving the code behind for good.
In my PhD program, most guys in the lab saw the actual engineering side of things as a stepping stone to higher-paid positions in acadaemia.
Clearly a significant number of people with engineering degrees are engineers only by title.
Suddenly everything makes sense. :)
Seriously though, where are those stats coming from?
They understand their organisation will descend into chaos I their Operations are not controlled
But they probably always have lived with crap IT - and so so not understand what competitive advantages come from having IT well controlled. Give it thirty or so years
The whole meme started with Nick Carr's infamous Does IT Matter? editorial in the Harvard Business Review. He argued that while IT provided a competitive advantage in the past, it doesn't anymore. It's important for keeping up with the competition, but it will never put you ahead of the competition because it has been commoditized. All of his arguments made perfect sense at the time. And most IT organizations to date still take them to heart.
His arguments just assumed one thing incorrectly: they assumed that enterprise IT would never change in terms of the end user functionality it delivered. He assumed there was no more innovation to be had, that everything ever needed to be invented had been invented, and so we had reached the peak of functionality, like how you can't improve much upon the hammer and nail beyond perhaps the screw and electric power screwdriver.
Unfortunately, IT is treated like a commodity for most organizations, and commodities never get special attention.
IS MBNA a typo for MBA or is this a specialized certification I've never heard of?
