Thanks for an informative article, Greg! A topic worth understanding.

When the DOT.COM bust hit I was VP of Engineering at a software startup run by a guy who thought the investor money tap would never run dry. It did and the market for software VPs dried up at the same time.

To keep the wolf from the door, I took a contract as a senior software engineer at a defense contractor. The software product team was top notch, but internal IT support was barely competent. Corporate management solved the problem by outsourcing IT, rather that hiring a competent manager for the function. The net result was that they spent more money for less competent and responsive IT support which in turn made software product development more difficult. That left me with a low opinion of IT outsourcing,

American business culture expects executives to have basic accounting skills. Why does it not expect them to have basic IT competency?

I'm back to running my own software startup and we have no internal IT. We use the Google business suite for calendar, mail, word processing, spread sheets, and presentations. We use SaaS for most other apps, run our own servers on Linode and AWS, and the less technical employees use Chromebooks. Problem solved.