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For more than 25 years, information technology has been suffering from an identity crisis. For at least that long, the most pressing questions facing the industry have remained virtually unchanged: What is our underlying value and how do we demonstrate it to the rest of business world? Who are we and why are we here? It's now time to get over this crisis and put an end to the decades-old soul-searching. Those in IT need to accept our lot in life alongside other professions. After all, when was the last time you heard a convention of lawyers debating what value they bring to their companies?

Jokes aside, however, we can learn a lot from other professions about how to fit in to the business landscape. To overcome our identity crisis, we need to learn more from these groups about our expectations and execution.

One of the things we have to learn to do is accept certain realities that our industry has been trying to solve for decades. Sometimes there is no simple answer and we have to learn, just as other professions have, that there isn't always a tidy or elegant solution. Like the old adage says "you can't be all things to all people." Some of these include:

➔ Customized vs. packaged solutions This is the "buy vs. build" debate that virtually every IT department has encountered. Web-based Software as a Service (SaaS) may be injecting the "buy" philosophy into many organizations, but others will always argue that no packaged product could ever meet their unique needs. With no one size fitting all, companies will continue to have this debate every time they make a major technology investment.

➔ Interaction with end users IT is always going to have to manage a fine balance in how much end users are involved in design and development processes. Understanding customer needs is a textbook best practice for developing successful technologies. But like tax time with your accountant or building a custom-designed house, the more the end user is involved in back-end processes, the more time and effort (and potential for problems) are involved.

➔ Utility vs. innovation From mainframes to the Web, IT's primary role throughout most of its history has been as a source of innovation and competitive differentiation. With the sector maturing and with IT now being present in every organization, that's simply not the case anymore. The more mature a company is with IT, the more likely it is that its primary role becomes one of utility. IT, in those instances, is not about inventing the next killer app, but about keeping the lights on. The reality is that the two are not mutually exclusive, and the right balance between innovation and utility will vary from company to company; but again, IT should learn that it need not be at the centre of every innovation.

IT has had to evolve as much in 50 years as other fields have over the course of centuries. Still, IT needs to take at least one more evolutionary step to catch up with its older sibling professions. Two specific examples come to mind:

➔ Accountability A common characteristic among virtually every other profession is a standard of accountability to clients and/or the public. The iron ring serves as a daily reminder of the life-or-death consequences of neglect or incompetence in professional engineering. In accounting or law, unethical or irresponsible behaviour can result in decertification, financial penalties or even criminal charges. Yes, there are organizations
such as the Canadian Information Processing Society that are leading the charge in IT self-regulation, but they are unable to impose strict standards of accountability without nationwide legislation.

➔ Quality control IT usually puts software and hardware through some form of testing, but nothing with the same degree of rigour as other professions, and nothing in the way of specific benchmarks or legislated factors of safety. Think of the testing that goes into automobile or aircraft manufacturing, with every wire, circuit, nut and bolt tested and documented numerous times. Even though some IT systems can have similar life and death consequences (electronic health records are but one example), that standard of quality control simply isn't there.

Let me conclude with a disclaimer of sorts. In spite of the label I've given it, the identity crisis is neither the death knoll for the industry nor the "end of technology as we know it." But as any IT veteran can attest, we've been wrestling with the same fundamental issues for far too long. It's time to move on.

The sooner we can settle into a more mature role, the sooner we can start to look and act like other professions. And the sooner we can accept that some issues just don't have a single solution, the sooner we can overcome our most pressing and persistent challenges.

John Krpan is General Manager and Executive Vice President, AMS and Staff Augmentation, of IT and management consulting firm Sierra Systems.