I recently needed some specialized work done to an Internet site and decided to trawl the Ideagoras on the Internet for a specialist. I was amazed to see not only the caliber of skills on sale but also the low prices which consultants in this space are prepared to do work for. Their reference is a star rating and comments on how good the work has been that they had donein the past. No one had to reveal their age or where they had been to school or what grades they had achieved or what country they lived in. This is a true flattening principal at work here.  What more do you need to know than that they had achieved what others had previously asked them to do in the manner prescribed.

I ended up however not using a consultant but instead buying a component which will hopefully do the same as a consultant would have done however with support for the next year (the old build or buy question).

Is the risk of allowing someone you wont ever meet onto your Corporate website to tinker still too high a risk?

I would really like to know who - in bigger companies - is in charge for projects related to e-business. I guess that's mainly the IT itself instead of departments like marketing, communcations or sales. That's the situation I met all the time during my career. I made the shift from IT to communcations by myself and I have - always had - a hard time formulating new ideas in my career coming up against the internal IT department. With the advent of Web2.0 this is all that much more apparent particularly when it comes to the usage of open source software.

Some of the reasons:

• IT input is usually quite high when it comes to these kinds of projects and as such they take ownership.
• Cross departmental systems have high profile across the board. Therefore everybody wants to be accountable for them (and wants to have a say in the budget).
• The usage of open source software - if suggested by any other department than the IT - is often denied by these experts because of its so called security implications. I believe, the reason behind their refusal to adopt Open Source is the lack of skill needed and the fear that the knowledge of how to run this kind of software sits outside the IT department.

And what is the knock-on effect of all this?

• For the IT department, a project is succesful as long as the result is a stable software and ticks the requirement box placed by the business users. Most of the time IT don't even follow up and find out if the desired results have been achieved. They wait for the users to break the software and then blame the Business user.
• Big companies are too slow and dull for succesful e-business. They cant keep up the pace like smaller more agile companies.

Internal IT departments in companies still behave like gods instead of being the experts who are delivering good services.