Via Securosis, I got pointed to an excellent article from an EMC VP talking about vendor beating and some hard lessons in IT. While clearly the point is geared around beating up your vendor for poor reasons and how EMC will work with you, the more powerful points in the article revolve around management of an organization’s IT situation, which includes keeping up with technology, forging relationships, knowing users, keeping the team current, and otherwise just not letting your team be the low group on the totem pole who gets the fingers pointed at them, regardless of reality. Things like the slow creep of poorly planned and poorly grown IT operations. Or the slow obsolescence of systems and even people.