I read with great interest the commentary by Dan Briody in CIO Insight today. He asks a worthy question, “Could IT have saved Citigroup?” But in my opinion, that query has nothing to do with reality. True, the Citigroup we knew is no longer; it is morphing (and taking its disparate IT groups with it). But no matter how great the IT leaders are at a company, they are always the handmaiden of the business units, not the gatekeepers.

Having worked for an earlier incarnation of Citi in the 1980’s, I came away with a sense of the fiercely competitive business units within the organization. That was just after Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published their wildly popular business book In Search of Excellence, and Citi was held forth as a successful company for its innovative business leadership.

And Citi, more than any other corporation I have experienced, rigorously tied any technology project to a business return on the investment. And they did so very smartly. For example, with outsourcing (that dirty word), they immediately realized savings in the custom programming department and were able to migrate many legacy systems to newer platforms that would otherwise never have been changed. However at the same time, they prudently kept control of the outsourcing fad, limiting offshore engagements to no more than 25 or 30% of their applications.

So where did Citi go wrong? What I experienced in the early 80’s was a corporate culture that celebrated the individual business leader within the bank. In some instances, it devolved into fratricide among departments. In fact, my unit within Citi was spun off as a different company and the products we had developed at Citi became products we sold to Citi. It quickly became apparent that the VP’s who signed off on equipment purchases from us were friendly toward the business leaders who had previously worked at Citi. However, there was a dark side to their fealty-- if a VP wanted to come in ‘under budget’ with their IT expenses, they would delay paying us until another business cycle. Frequently a VP kept us on the hook for payment until they were promoted internally, or they left the company. That was my first encounter with corporate politics and it was unsettling to see how an individual’s survival instinct could run counter to the welfare of the organization as a whole.

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman celebrated Citi (it was Citicorp at that time) for their cultivation of the business leader (people) who had vision (action) and they saw in Citi a trend toward innovation and risk taking in their willingness create new solutions for their customers (customer). Peters even said this kind of leadership was a triumph over the ‘bean counters,’ who had run the great American corporation during the 1970’s.

So how does this relate to the question “Could IT have saved Citi?” The answer is still "No." IT could not have saved Citi any more than the bean counters could have. My perception of IT, since the beginning of my career has been that IT always comes in second to the business goals of the organization. In the case of Citi, under its former leadership, the aggrandizement of the individual business units lead to a balkanization among the lines of business. Each unit was jockeying for a better position in the next race for themselves, not out of shared sense of corporate governance. In fact, corporate governance, which includes how and where IT dollars get spent, became an expression of the political ambitions of the individuals in the business units.

While IT leaders are rock stars in many organizations, and their salaries are commensurate or greater than the salaries of their business counterparts, they must operate within the corporate culture. Those of us in technology management positions know that the technology we adopt is changing the way business is conducted—so we are change agents, in that we are supporting new and disruptive technologies. But the philosophies of the business leaders at the top of the food chain is the blueprint of the corporate culture. IT may be building the house with newer materials and technologies, but Business is still the general contractor.