Totally agree. I was chatting over drinks with a finance director at a firm I was working with and he couldn't understand 'why the IT cost so much', implying th

Totally agree. I was chatting over drinks with a finance director at a firm I was working with and he couldn't understand 'why the IT cost so much', implying that he couldn't see any value in it. Similarly the sales guys at the firm were selling a solution to a large FTSE 100 company and they couldn't work out how to price it. They sold it for a fifth of what the customer later said they would have paid. If they are admitting to being willing to pay 5 times more, imagine how much they would have paid had the sales guys known the true value of the software. No wonder the finance director thought IT cost too much. I've often tried to explain the utility vs strategically important nature of IT - it scares the shit out of some business people as they've been happily blundering along thinking IT is just a cost centre and serially underinvesting and seriously damaging their company's bottom line. </rant>