Expenses for computing will be camouflaged as consulting fees, service contracts, office supplies or wasted time of administrative personnel. The expenses for information management are now sufficiently pervasive that it is easy to hide them into unrelated accounts. Outputs, such as profits or revenue, do not determine the demand for information technologies. It is the organizational structure, the size of the corporate overhead, the opinions about the benefits of computerization, the proliferation of personal computers and the number of staff people that dictate the demand for computing. All of these are input.
Output is a consequence.
In the absence of trustworthy metrics, the current corporate and public sector practice is not to budget computers according to specified results, but according to the perceived needs of its proponents. Consultants and government bureaucrats reinforce this bias by offering advice on best practices for managing inputs in the hope that this will somehow yield superior outputs. Budget analysts usually find it more rewarding to examine information technology costs rather than examining what benefits computer funding requests will deliver. The information technology budget, as an expense item, contains no meaningful insights by which someone can judge either its utility or its appropriate size. It is not realistic to expect that during the annual budget reviews the chief computer executive can prove what are the profit gains from the proposed computer spending.