The IT gravy train must be derailed

"The IT gravy train must be derailed", Robert Cowles (WI State Senator). An article on WTN (Monday) reports on several state senators calling for an audit of state-government IT spending.

Overall I agree with the theme presented in a couple press releases from last Friday: an audit seems like a very healthy thing to do.

Projects run over budget: it happens. Projects run way over budget: sometimes you can't avoid that either. When it's happening consistently though, it's time to take a step back to identify and address what's going wrong.

My only disagreements with the releases are on fairly subtle and somewhat minor points:

• The fact that a someone is "high paid" (or that something has a high price tag) doesn't mean that they're overpriced and/or not worth it... Doesn't mean they are worth it either, but you need to take a closer look to make that call.


• Having to spend $1.5 million in the middle of a $47 million project just to make sure you're moving in the right direction is unfortunate. but in all likelihood, if the key players think that it's worthwhile: it's going to save you money in the end.