No cure no pay? Let's turn the IT business model around

We had the Internet-bubble. And its burst. Before that, you were pretty much considered a fool if you didn't borrow money to invest in dot.com businesses

We also have the credit crisis. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Wall Street fell in 2009. After religion and politics, now also economics have proven to not be sustainable in their extreme forms

There hasn't been much applause for new technologies during either of those two periods. Currently, Cloud computing is meeting a lot of resistance, and the rebranded E2.0, Social Business Design, is receiving some tough questions as well

But, in between those periods, we welcomed CRM, ERP, ESB, SOA, UML, BPEL, and lots of other acronyms that were largely overstated, undercriticised, misunderstood, and hardly raised ROI, at least not yet, or not anymore

Why is there no cure no pay in Law, but not in IT? That would make work so much more challenging and rewarding. Not that I like the crazy culture where you can sue for millions for getting a blister on your finger, but it surely would be nice to have some change
With IT evangelists on one side and the Business Prevention Unit on the other, IT solutions tend to be either implemented in isolation, or imposed from above. Which in either case leads to something that is not accepted by the users or organisation. Without acceptance, it's not used. Without usage, there can't be ROI

It would be very social-media like to have a model like that. If you have nothing to say, you won't get much people to follow you on Twitter or Facebook. If you're very interesting, you'll attract a lot of people. There are tricks to bend or even break these rules, but those are exceptions (it will be a while before humans get adapted to that but please quote me on that in the meantime, it will help)

No cure no pay would force our evangelists into producing solid business cases, and our Business Prevention Units into producing solid IT cases. And we'd all be one big happy family again, being one big company with the sole goal of making customers happy. Which would make us happy

It's very different nowadays. There are claims and lawsuits, but that's when the relationship or partnership has fallen through
With the current licensing model, parties are committing themselves to a 5 to 10 year period on anything enterprise-level. Making it impossible to label anything as a mistake after a year or two, as that neither would relieve you from the payments to be made for the remaining years, nor favour you as the employee of the year in the next company elections...
That's pretty much like throwing a big 50,000 dollar wedding, thereby committing yourself to at least 5-10 years of marriage. That's so old skool

Maybe enterprises have outgrown us, and our tiny mind is too small to handle the scale at which it operates, so all we can do is tweak the amount of time over which we change things?

Who knows. But something must be done to finally have IT outgrow its adolescent status