January 29, 2001, 1:08 PM — I was taken aback recently when, within a week, executives from several large corporations called with the same question: Should we recentralize our IT function? It wasn't the coincidence of many companies asking the same question at the same time that was so surprising as much as the retro nature of the question itself.
I have seen and participated in the IT centralization/decentralization debate about every 10 years. The first debate took place when minicomputers gave rise to departmentalized computing in the 1970s. The next debate came with the proliferation of PCs in the '80s. During both debates, managers argued over who should control the computing anarchy that those little machines were causing inside their companies. Now, the Internet is reviving the argument.
But the debate shouldn't even be rooted in those old terms of control. The Internet, combined with inexpensive and wireless devices, makes IT too ubiquitous to think -
