IT is mostly rewarded with preserving what is and fighting politics... not delivering new value. This varies from place to place of course, but it's effectivel

IT is mostly rewarded with preserving what is and fighting politics... not delivering new value. This varies from place to place of course, but it's effectively due to the knowledge gap between "the business" and "IT" that leads to a misunderstanding of the vast spectrum (10x or more!) of how well IT organizations perform. The closest analogy is with auto manufacturing in the 70s having to face the Toyota product development and production system. It was utterly foreign and took decades for the top companies to figure it out. Now look at IT, which is at most organizations only one of many contributing departments like marketing or operations. Is it any wonder CEOs have no idea they could do things differently? Especially when you have hundreds of thousands of people whose salary DEPENDS on the CEO not figuring this out (I'm looking at the big system integrators, enterprise software vendors, and managed service providers here). True story - If you try to (say) fire IBM out of a data centre, are you prepared for the president of IBM to call the chairman of your board of directors to subtly question the competence of your CIO? Who does your board trust more, a brand with 100+ years of exposure, or John Smith the CIO? You had better have prepped the CEO, CIO, and CFO on your plans and get them on-side, so they understand. Could you imagine doing this with a complex specialized topic like Agile/Lean, Cloud, Open Source, etc? It is like convincing your grandmother to drop AT&T or Bell South for VOIP, or convincing them that AOL actually isn't the internet. Not impossible but requires a lot of patience and trust.