When I was 20 years old I received a devastating prediction. I would be boring, miserable and never have a meaningful relationship with a woman. If this prediction had been delivered by a wild black haired woman in a tent on a fairground I could have laughed it off. But no, this came with the full force of late 1970's science and technology, printed on some green and white computer paper. It was the results from an aptitude test and the algorithm had determined that I should either be an accountant or work in computers. Friends had been given bits of paper with journalist, barrister, advertising executive and for one, who was a punk rocker, complete with bondage gear, very improbably, a vicar. All seemed worthwhile and interesting jobs. I saw myself as someone destined to change the world, not reconciling expenses and playing Dungeon and Dragons in the evening.

Much of my early life was fighting against the inevitable. A Don Quixote existence. Eventually, I ended up where the algorithm said I would end up; in Information Technology. It was a completely different world to what I had expected. We were changing the world. It was exciting. I thought we were creating a brand new age and in many ways we were. Spend a day in the office without the IT revolution. Switch your PC off, create an 'out of office' reply that says that anybody who wants to talk to you will have to come and see you at your desk. Turn your blackberry off. Handwrite letters. No more cut and paste, unless it is to send that letter to your neighbour complaining about their Leylandii hedge. Even then it's glue and a copy of The Sun.

Everyone used to want to talk to people in IT. Hey, once it was even cool to be in IT. Even Bill Gates found a woman and got married. Now it's gone full circle. Just as when I was young nobody wants to talk to IT. We have become like some embarrasing Aunt in a Gothic novel, confined to an attic, out of sight and not likely to cause embarrassment to the rest of the family. The idea of having an IT Director on the Board now seems like a quaint anachronism from a bygone age, CEO's now say, 'Why would I want to talk to the head of IT, is e-mail down?'.

It is to this, that an entertaining and assertive book, 'The IT Value Stack - A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership' has been written by Ade McCormack. The book addresses the woeful lack of influence that IT now has within organisations and seeks to act as a clarion call for IT professionals. He sees IT professionals as being integral to the strategy of the business. IT should not follow the business strategy but should be, to use his phrase. 'entwined' in the construction of their strategy. IT should be the deliverers of process change. He asserts that because IT is so central to the success of a business, then executives need to be IT savvy but IT professionals have to be business savvy. Then there are two layers that are more recognisable to IT departments, i.e. managing the technology, which is complex and then delivering this to the users. On the sixth level there is Circulation Management, 'which embraces both structured data held in databases through to unstructured knowledge stored in unstructured documents and in the heads of subject matter experts.' Overseeing and monitoring this is the Value Management layer which shows what return the business is getting from IT.

My own area of expertise has been neatly packaged into the Circulation Layer. As a boost to my own ego, it sits in the second highest level. It is this layer that data is transformed into information. The storage of this information becomes knowledge and with its use within the system, this base metal of data, of which there is lot, is transformed into the pure gold of wisdom.

I am not sure though why this is seen as an IT function though. The IT department touches all the functions in the business. So does HR. So does Accounts. So do the cleaners. MY own experience would point to the fact that this must be driven by those in the business, who know what the organisation needs, have some idea how it is going to get there and some clout to make it happen.

Ade McCormack makes some wonderful assertions. "One day", he breezily announces, "....intellectual capital will be a standard entry in company accounts"(p. 217). No, it won't. Not in our lifetimes or in the lifetimes of anyone alive today, however much medical science advances. Or as in some mad Newtonian utopia "everyone will be able to predict the future". No they won't. We can't even predict the weather five days hence and human society is an infinitely more complex and chaotic than our weather systems. How many people predicted the implosion of Northern Rock?

Sharing knowledge is difficult within organisations. I would agree that IT has an important role to play in capturing knowledge and sharing this within the organisation. This explains the popularity of workflow software. Thus, it may be known that when someone is ordering a take-away meal they can be persuaded to spend more by asking 'Would you like fries with that?'. We can put this knowledge into the till system to act as a prompt for the sales assistant. Or when we have a client asking about home insurance, we can get the system to check which other insurances they have with us and which they don't and what is up for renewal and the system can create an offer that would be suited to that specific client. Modern software solutions can do this and this is the biggest driver for productivity. This is where large organisations suddenly starts to get the advantage that we would expect them to have over small organisations. A process change can be implemented quickly and uniformly throughout the whole business.

Outside of workflow, life is a little bit more difficult. Do we remember customer relationship management systems. It came trailing clouds of glory. Everything about the customer in one place. No more embarrassment about turning up to visit a client and noticing one of your colleagues sitting in reception waiting for a meeting with the CEO to discuss a project that you knew nothing about or to ask about how your contact's spouse was, only to find they are in the middle of a messy divorce. Well that was the dream. Implementations did not take into account the simple fact that knowledge workers do not like to give up knowledge, even if you have paid for them to acquire it. Salesmen want to take 'their' clients with them when they leave. More than likely they will be going to a competitor and their value is enhanced by these contacts. The relationship is with the person and not really with the company.

Nor is this restricted to salesmen. The unwritten contract between employer and employee has dissolved in the last 20 years. Despite platitudes that 'people are our most important asset' most employees sense that they may be only a bad quarter from the scrapheap. Many turn themselves into little black boxes where they create important pieces of information and knowledge for the business but do so in way that is impenetrable to anybody else.

Here Ade McCormack is onto something. Human intervention is extraordinarily expensive. Executives may be aware of this. However , We usually have a disspiriting conversation that goes something like this:

'Well, we can get that information already. We just write a SQL report and give that to the users, which they put into a spreadsheet.

'Does it take you long?'

'No not at all. We know the system and they always pretty much ask for the same thing'.
'Does it take the users long?'

'I really don't know, they enjoy working on spreadsheets'

This labour of Sisyphus goes unnoticed. Trapped somewhere in the general overhead of the business.

This comes down to the business knowing what it is trying to do and knowing what people have to deliver to actually make that happen. There is a need for an infrastructure to deliver this. IT has an important role in delivering this and ensuring that it is available to the end users. I am not convinced by Ade McCormack's thesis that we need, or have the time, to wait for the IT department to become everything he argues it needs to be.

Alas, the slow decline will continue.