Engineers aren't in charge, anywhere, other than tech companies.
Empirically speaking, a lot of the guys who graduated with their B.Sc. in computer science with me saw their career paths as joining a big consulting company, working on the front lines for a couple of years and then getting into management and leaving the code behind for good.
In my PhD program, most guys in the lab saw the actual engineering side of things as a stepping stone to higher-paid positions in acadaemia.
Clearly a significant number of people with engineering degrees are engineers only by title.
That is, people working on actual engineering aren't really "engineers" if they have their eyes set on something else, like a higher position in acadaemia.
Suddenly everything makes sense. :)
Seriously though, where are those stats coming from?
They understand their organisation will descend into chaos I their Operations are not controlled
But they probably always have lived with crap IT - and so so not understand what competitive advantages come from having IT well controlled. Give it thirty or so years
The whole meme started with Nick Carr's infamous Does IT Matter? editorial in the Harvard Business Review. He argued that while IT provided a competitive advantage in the past, it doesn't anymore. It's important for keeping up with the competition, but it will never put you ahead of the competition because it has been commoditized. All of his arguments made perfect sense at the time. And most IT organizations to date still take them to heart.
His arguments just assumed one thing incorrectly: they assumed that enterprise IT would never change in terms of the end user functionality it delivered. He assumed there was no more innovation to be had, that everything ever needed to be invented had been invented, and so we had reached the peak of functionality, like how you can't improve much upon the hammer and nail beyond perhaps the screw and electric power screwdriver.
Unfortunately, IT is treated like a commodity for most organizations, and commodities never get special attention.
Most CEOs think IT is a commodity like electricity - you cannot buy "better" electricity. But this is crap - way back when you could buy better electricity - the debate ranged from power smoothing to DC/AC - and your smelter or your lights could depend on the Chief Electrical Officer
...
oh hell I don't care anymore - anyone dumb enough not to think that an IT literate workforce working on IT-enabled processes cannot out perform an illiterate company (just as we now know a reading and writing literate workforce can) deserves to get Schumpeter-ed
And even today when it comes to the price it still matters. And in the developing world you still can buy electricity with different quality and uptime.
His argument centered around these fortune 500 companies whom purchased big ERP systems and had custom development done for various parts of their businesses as a strategic investment (and a trade secret). It turned out that almost all of these companies built similar modules, since all of these companies on average hired smart managers that understood where inefficiencies could be eliminated via technology.
His correct conclusion was that these bits of tech were not strategic but rather simply the cost of doing business and thusly were open to commoditization.
Now here's where folks take a leap of faith and say that /all/ IT doesn't matter.
The way I look at it, all innovation can be strategic depending upon your business and its priorities. For most companies power and ping are commodities, but for Google it is a competitive advantage. Google would never outsource their operations to big blue, but for PWC that would probably be a good move.
Even at the micro scale you can see this in github repos where large companies will open source core modules but keep their competitive code proprietary.
IS MBNA a typo for MBA or is this a specialized certification I've never heard of?