So the World Cup came and went.  England’s underwhelming campaign was greeted by loud media recriminations. These centred on an ambivalent showing by overpaid and lazy stars or key players jaded after a long domestic season. Worse, wrong formations were blamed for stifling the team’s creativity. It was also being suggested that the team were not being consulted on tactics by a well-resourced but seemingly autocratic team coach. The disciplinarian regime ignored the building of team spirit and failed to deliver the goods in unique and trying tournament conditions. For his part, the manager failed. There is some truth in these criticisms, but perhaps we also need to see the team’s difficulties as part of a wider picture of gradual English football decline with the squeezing out of home-grown players in the top teams and failure to absorb new coaching skills and ideas in the way that more successful countries seem to do.

It might be unfair to draw any direct parallels with some organisations’ use of IT but I’m still surprised by those companies that make a considerable investment in their business and technology systems, only to be frustrated by their ongoing performance. Worse, they periodically make further large investments in technology such as new ERP systems still expecting a quick fix and then remain puzzled by the lack of a step change or transformation of their business’ capabilities.   Many of these organisations are understandably busy dealing with their customers’ daily needs while failing to take the necessary good hard look at the business outcomes they require and rethink the business processes that will support those goals.  Too often, senior management views IT as only one of many areas to be quickly fixed when they need to more fully grasp their organisation’s core processes (not an easy task), the ability of IT systems to support them, and operational constraints on their infrastructure and IT personnel.

IT system overhaul is inevitable at some point but a series of well-thought out incremental changes to a business’s processes and IT infrastructure could make all the difference in the meantime. In addition, the IT team needs to be given the scope to retire old systems, automate time-consuming low-level tasks and work with (rather than in isolation from) senior management to identify necessary outcomes. These changes, carefully related to the organisation’s core business goals, can deliver performance uplift and better returns and greater longevity on their existing IT investments.  These changes might equate in footballing terms to studying competitors’ tactics more closely, consulting the whole team on formation or tactics, resting players before major tournaments and examining ways to improve the coaching of young talent over time.

I'm no soccer pundit but I'm sure that, whatever the sports writers say, you simply can't drop all our star players or sack Fabio Capello the minute that things start to go wrong - it's much more complicated than that.