Is in-house back in for IT professionals?

Before the Second World War, many large blue-chip firms used to have their own in-house advertising agencies. In other words: everything was in-house - our way is the only way.

Since the end of the 1980s, corporations have thrown out this doctrine.

If it's not core, you don't do it, has become the motto. Sticking to your knitting meant that a company only employed widget-makers, and went to market to get its ancillary services. IT, that expensive, unreliable overhead, came to be viewed in the same class as 'giving the hewers of wood their morning tea'.

Times have changed. A technologically aggressive US bank such as Capital One talks of the need to hang on to IT, raising its in-house complement from 50 to 750, with 500 more planned. And we have all learned to say 'insourcing'.

Yet if IT is now seen as a core competence, why is the industry still full of staffers who hop jobs after two years? Is it employers creating the 'just-in-time' recruitment culture through poor staff development procedures?

Or is it that IT professionals who've spent the last 10 years seeing their departments bought and sold like cattle don't trust their organisations' long-term commitment to their job function?

Perhaps outsourcing will soon be seen as having created as many problems as it solved.

Customer satisfied?

A lot of rubbish gets talked about customers.

First, there's the myth about the customer being king. Hardly. Then there's the one about the customer always being right. Wrong!

What's undoubtedly true is that some customers are not worth the risk.

How about a customer that could potentially cost you a £180 million write-off, endangering your stock market flotation? Worth the bother? Probably not.

Business schools will one day teach the lessons of Pathway, the doomed scheme to automate social security benefits through smartcard-enabled post offices. This turkey has cost ICL £180 million, and the taxpayer £640 million. That's more than £10 for each person in the whole country.

The problem? ICL says it was trying to serve two customers, the Post Office and the DSS Agency, whose interests and motivations were different.

Needless to say, it all went haywire.

The lesson, it seems, is that man cannot serve two masters. When the customer is divided, the customer is wrong. Choose whom you do business with carefully, then do it properly with him.