The less competently it performs, the more compelling are its demands for ever more power; the more power it has, the more effectively it can hide the reasons for its incompetence. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's a runaway greenhorn effect.
I now suspect that if IT as a whole had substantially f*cked up the Y2K conversion, the high tech slump would never have happened, and CIOs would be commanding bigger benefit packages than CEOs.
Giovanni