Three years after the dotcom bust, IT budgets are starting to rise again and companies of all sizes are telling you how it will make their business bigger and better. Unfortunately, when you enquire about the real business benefits, things start to unravel. The conversation goes something like this:

CEO: We are implementing a new CRM (customer relationship management) system that will greatly improve our customer service.

Me: Great, how is the CRM system going to help you improve your customer service?

CEO: We are putting all of our customer information onto one big database.

Me: Ok. How will this database improve customer service?

CEO: We will be able to handle queries more quickly.

Me: Sounds good. How much quicker? And while we're on the subject, was the speed of handling customer queries one of the major problems with your customer service?

CEO: Erm. How much quicker, we don't know. On customer service, we don't know. We never thought to ask them.

Me: What if the speed of handling queries is not something customers are concerned with?

CEO: Then I have just wasted an awful lot of money.

Why has this CEO made the same mistake as countless other CEOs? Because he has treated IT as special. IT is simply an enabling technology. It is not a business solution in itself, but is the enabler of business solutions. So why do people think that IT is special?

· IT is still fairly new and is still poorly understood, especially by senior management;

· The dotcom boom (and bust) gave IT a mystical air. Consultants eulogising about the internet meant that chief executives all over the world had to make sure they treated IT as special;

· In recent years, many management fads were mistakenly thought to be about IT systems as opposed to IT facilitating new ways of looking at business issues;

· IT is expensive. There is a rationale that says the more you spend on something, the more important it must be;

· IT directors and consultants are often very smart people and carry enormous credibility. It is no wonder that CEOs pay so much attention to them. The truth is that most IT professionals have little business understanding. Do they know what a business model is? A cash-flow statement?

· IT can be a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Newsflash: almost anything in your company can be a source of competitive advantage.

So how should you treat IT?

IT is about making your operations more effective, whether it is sales operations, customer service operations or any other type of operations. If you treat IT as an enabler of more effective operations, the earlier conversation would go like this:

CEO: We are a company that competes on quality customer service and we are just about to massively improve our customer service.

Me: Really, how?

CEO: We surveyed our customers and found that they hate the time it takes us to handle queries. We have re-engineered our existing processes and come up with new ones that reduce the query-handling time by 90%. In order to implement these, we needed to change our existing computer systems. After an exhaustive search, we have found a piece of software that meets our new process needs almost exactly.

· Russell King is an IT consultant.