Making opportunity out of a crisis

Today I had the pleasure to spend time in a session with Peter Weill from the MIT Sloan school of Management who amongst other roles is chair of the Centre for Information Systems Research (CISR).  He was talking about the opportunity within the current economic downturn for organisations to take stock of the real costs and value of the IT they employ and to optimise the business processes which involve the IT systems.   Research his centre has done has shown that the deployment and use of IT infrastructure can have a return on investment (ROI) of more than 80:1, a ratio unsurpassed with any other organisational asset except perhaps the people in it.  But many organisations don't reach anything like this figure.  The current economic crisis provides a context in which ideas to radically revise IT infrastructure are likely to come up against fewer internal blockages and organisational inertia than when times are good.  There is more of an appetite for change at this time than any other.  Peter's view therefore was that this is the time to act.