13.1 Introduction

In 1639 John Woodall, a surgeon's mate in the English Navy, observed that sailors who took regular quantities of limes did not contract scurvy (the disease caused by lack of vitamin C). In those days this was a momentous discovery when you consider that almost 50 per cent of sailors on long voyages died, mostly from scurvy. And so it was that many sailors had to be press-ganged into the navy, because your chances of long-term survival were limited.

In spite of this knowledge that limes prevented scurvy, the English Navy did not adopt the use of the fruits as a standard practice on their ships. In 1753 James Lind rediscovered the work of Woodall and published his findings widely. Still the English Navy disregarded what was fast becoming common knowledge. It was only the disastrous outbreak of scurvy that crippled the Arctic expedition of the HMS Discovery in 1877 that spurred the Navy into adopting the policy of carrying and using limes on all naval voyages. (The English came to be called Limeys .) But the English Merchant Navy adopted this standard only some forty years later.

What does this have to do with managing IT in the twenty-first century? Well, in the face of mounting evidence that the way we manage IT no longer matches the way business works or indeed wants their IT delivered, we steadfastly cling to the old ways and myths of IT management. These...