Or, to put it another way, we can't do wonderful things if we spend all our time heroically putting out fires.

That's a kind of IT heroism we can no longer afford. But we've had nothing to replace it with -- until now.

And that has been a problem. IT people, from the greenest intern to the most seasoned CIO, want to be heroes. We all want to solve the problem, rescue the project, resurrect the network, save the IT budget. We want to demonstrate our value by making things work and keeping them working.

Unfortunately, for too many years that's exactly what we've had to do. Every time technology has jumped a level, we've scrambled to keep up. We've whipsawed from mainframes to minis to PCs to client/server to intranets and extranets. The hardware was shaky. The software didn't work. The networks were full of hiccups. In the early days after any technology shift, it took heroism just to keep things going at all.

And once those first days of crisis were over? We missed the excitement. We looked for new ways to be heroes. We knew the alternative was dull stability.