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Comment by vermontdevil | Hacker News Reader

The persistent view that IT is a cost-center is why this happens.

I think this is mostly true though. There are two separate areas, _technology_ and IT.

Technology is often not a cost centre and can be a competitive advantage for the right company, but Maersk is not and probably doesn't need to be a tech company (although I guess they could have a tech-forward strategy).

IT, as in, what it takes to have a computer per employee that they can use, phones, productivity software, etc, is almost never going to be a competitive advantage. It's almost always going to be a cost-centre, definitely so for a company like Maersk.

If it's done wrong it can definitely be a loss centre though, as in 'lose the whole company'. And arguably you see little innovation once you've outsourced it. This pleases accountants, as innovation scares them, and consistent billing fulfills them.

However, when technology is called upon to interface between the deeply technical (operations analysis for solving efficient container shipping and fleet Management), the thousands of people and manual handling and data entry operations per day, in just about every country and climate possible, then your IT operations are non-standard.

Many IT teams do a lot to further this view unfortunately. They are often too passive and fail to engage with the rest of the company. Creativity isn't valued and good folks leave which means you only have very average process drones. These folks are then ripe for replacement by cheap, outsourced labor.

That describes exactly the situation at my company. IT is full of smooth talking managers and analysts who know nothing but manage a large army of outsourced super cheap contractors. Pretty much all experts have left or have been laid off.

I think this appeared on HN a few days ago:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527153/opinion-the-un...

This is a good point. Goes both ways.

More that you can't easily quantify the value of crises that never came to fruition because of a competent IT staff.

Invisible == worthless to the Harvard business school types.

Yes. In most companies IT is a miserable place to work at.

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