great point! I love the debate this is spawning. You forgot to include a link to your blog:
http://gfish.wordpress.com/

You stated that just creeping along, making incremental change after incremental change doesn’t allow you to catch up with the galloping marketplace. In my experience that’s very true. Your points of advice however, is something the executives do every day and have done for years. The challenge is to get them to accept that if they rely on a powerful IT infrastructure to deliver their services, they need to open up the wallet, allow IT to do what it needs to do to keep current and limit distractions and change requests to mission critical minimums.

Curious what you found unrealistic – is it the request to understand your customers, talk to the people on the ground doing the work, be patient, invest now, establish metrics? Perhaps its just the thought that enterprises can learn, innovate and change? I hope I’m not being unrealistic – look at the founders of some of the more innovative companies today on the web (salesforce, workday, amazon) – you’ll find that those founders came from large corporate entities- those enterprise left an opportunity for a smaller, more innovative company to come along and displace a large portion of their business.

Again, IMHO, enterprises need to re-think how they are executing online today, or become the “Harvard Business Journal’s case studies of opportunities lost” tomorrow -

Corporate IT might be made up of a web operations team, system support, networking, security, enterprise application architecture, etc, etc, etc (and all of these units responsible for the overall deliniation of responsibilities related to launching a custom application). These different groups have different budgets, different department heads, different agendas, etc.

The bottom line is that even with C-level support for a project, any “enterprise” will have things scheduled out 6 months to a year for IT-related projects and budgets that have already been spoken for.

In your case, you either need to start small, and develop a multi-year “program” that will enable your business to slowly build over time, or piggy-back on an existing vendor like Deloitte, Accenture, Bearing Point or others that, for some reason, have the relationships that YOU do not.

You can not assume that legacy systems are a bad thing. The reason they have layers of new technology “bolted on” to them is due to the fact that they are time consuming, expensive and really not realistic to replace in order to provide one single group within a multi-national organization to have a slick looking software application.

I agree with you on some points, however find others to be over-simplified to an extent of not being realistic.

And while I agree with getting buy-in across the organization, I would argue that creating silos (and per-silo metrics) is a good way to digest disruptive technology into an organization. For example, don’t judge your silverlight team by a flash yardstick.