Once, talking with a CEO of a car hire, I wanted to know what their Information Technology (IT) department was performing for the business.
Proudly, he began to tell me about their IT's modern technologies, qualified professionals, the sub-contracted companies and infrastructure built to support their entire operations.Believe me, even for a company that has the IT as their core-business, everything was amazingly high quality and very high numbers.
I wondered if all their capital invested would be paid back. If so, what would be their "Return On Investment" (ROI)? Well, I still do not know, but believing that they would have better alternatives for so.
That company would be looking at "Total Cost Of Ownership" (TCO) of their IT assets and projects? Maybe, but the CEO was too proud to answer this kind of question.
Not to say that a company should not have their own IT department, but I always believed that an IT department really adds value to their company, when instead of promoting the technologies employed, they're keeping focus on business requirements, are problems solvers, and accomplishments are speaking by themselves.
I have the conviction to say that the CEO would have given me other answers, if their IT department would be actually delivering the best options for their business.
Well, instead of have annual budget and "overhead" increasing, they could reduce them, focusing on their core-business, and transferring to a third company all those things that they are not specialist, so others could be doing better than them (supplier's core-business), e.g.: telecommunication, network, hardware maintenance, car rental system ("Software as a Service" is one of the best options), servers, data-center / cloud-computing, trainings, vehicles maintenances, etc.