Action Items for the CEO

Insist on rigorous pilot testing that clearly demonstrates proof-of-concept before you approve any major overhauls of your IT infrastructure. Beware of consultants who try to move your focus away from a technical architecture to one that requires you be synchronized with your strategic business vision. Many consultants/advisors have falsely assumed that a decentralized IT model provides the best support for a decentralized business model. For most large organizations, this is simply not true. As numerous fashion victims can attest, a collaboration between centralized and distributed systems leverages the strengths each model has to offer. While many have a financial interest in defining client/server to exclude the centralized mainframe, companies with several hundred end-users frequently fail using this definition.