Start a ground breaking project that will be amazing in 2 years.

Get promoted/leave for more money after 18mths.

2 years rolls around, everything is on fire but the guy with the matches is nowhere to be found.

Sounds very very familiar to me.

When reading these stories, part of me wants to give up and switch to the dark side. Instead of worrying about whether what we're doing is even useful for anyone, I could be earning money and prestige by leading large companies to deploy random SaaS solutions. What's not to like? I mean, except making your organization waste couple billion dollars and hundreds of man-years?

Or they just think “Tableau, Salesforce, data lakes, ERP, identity management, and "cloud" infrastructure each seem like useful tools if implemented smartly.”

Cute. We actually built a data lake (with Python and MySQL) and immediately found problems we weren't even aware of, like (as I mentioned above) people getting the same email multiple times in the same day.

When our sysadmin left, we migrated all our websites from leased hardware servers to cloud hosting and were able to use that head count to hire a developer instead, who has built great new web apps for staff and customers.

I understand the temptation to be cynical, but these really are useful tools. I say embrace change; it's fun.

I feel like Harvard Business Review articles are a form of keyword stuffing. Combinations of buzzwords when googled bring up a bunch of big consultancy websites.