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Oh yeah, we think good about ourselves, our evolution, our professionalism and all.
We do have civilization, education, infrastructures, hardware, software, IT-managers, business process managers, EDP auditors, CIO’s, CFO’s, controllers … an ongoing list of certifications, expertise’s, competences, jobs.

In the past 20 years I worked with organizations and their customers. What strikes me in this experience is that most of them bought and implemented CRM systems from a variety of vendors, but none of them started with being serious about all their relationships with: customers, suppliers, employees and other connections. Do you recognize this phenomenon?

As information professionals we're focused on information provision and the whole chain of actions, processes, behavior and technology that is necessary to make that happen. We're making Information Strategy Plans, Information Architectures, do some Business Process Management on the side and we make an inventory of all the applications, databases, web services, data warehouses, servers and infrastructure, and of course we assess that business and IT are aligned and that there is some kind of demand and supply mechanism.

In the last months, I have read with increasing astonishment articles in several IT-related magazines. Many words and sentences are similar to those used during the Internet boom (the ones that we already referred to as 'buzzwords'). For instance, in the articles that were published on SOE (Service Oriented Enterprise) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), etc. In one article I have read, someone complained about the fact that buyers of IT services did not understand them! I was shocked, although I am consistently guilty of that myself.

Recently, the place of the IT manager has been a topic of considerable discussion with the IT-focused media. Should this role be part of the management team? I have followed this discussion with increasing amazement. After the publication of the article “IT Doesn’t Matter” by Nicolas Carr (Harvard Business Review) and more than fifteen years of personal experience, I would say that of course an IT manager does not belong in the senior management team. I know that this statement will not be appreciated by my IT colleagues, but this is my point of view.

Many of us have grown up in an environment in which the ‘knowledge is power’ adage was worshipped as the leading principle. In the last decade of the twentieth century, a variety of developments regarding the Internet affected our ability to access and use information. Would the Information Revolution follow the Industrial Revolution? The density of broadband Internet connections is now particularly high and the number of Internet interactions (banking, booking trips, etc.) is rising rapidly.