"Of all the industries in the world, IT is probably the one most guilty of overselling itself," says Mike Roberts, recently systems director for Rolls Royce Engines and group director of ERP.

The industry seems incapable of seeing things from its customers' points of view. Roberts doesn't doubt that many IT projects have delivered savings for industrial companies. But he doubts whether the IT delivered as much of the benefit as the reorganisation the IT encouraged. Companies installing e-procurement have made big improvements in indirect purchasing, "but the benefit has come form the transformation in the procurement business." The Internet part of it has been "incidental". Process change is what counts.

But his strongest words are directed at the IT industry's failure to make itself aware of the real cost to its customers of adopting technology: "There's no such thing as an IT project, only a business project."

Software upgrades are particularly hard to justify: "Most software salesmen don't have a clue how to build a business case that stands up to scrutiny." They don't think about the need to communicate with staff, the training involved, the documentation that needs to be organised.

In a typical Rolls-Royce installation 10,000 people have to be communicated with and trained. The business processes they use have to be changed and the new data the systems use or generate have to be quality checked. The information in the processes has to be communicated, organised and stored, mined and shared, and made to work.

These are all business, not technology, issues: "These things are much more important than the software… You've got to get closer to customers and understand what the business benefits [of a new system] are for them. I have yet to find a software company that can sensibly help with the business case. That I find disappointing."

For more information on the Cambashi Seminar, please email Kathy.strachan@cambashi.com