Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article by Jeannette Borzo titled “Do-It-Yourself Software.” The subtitle is “New tools let businesspeople avoid the IT department and create their own computer applications.” The article describes some of the pros and cons of using tools from statups like Coghead selling do-it-yourself application builders. There are other startups in this space, including Wufoo and LongJump.

The subtitle of the article highlights the perception that there’s an ongoing tension between department managers and IT departments. That topic provides an opportunity to share a little more about our blist product vision. As I’ve shared previously in this blog I spent six years as the CIO of an investment bank (question for LazyWeb: should blog posts be totally self-contained or can an assumption be made that the reader has read all prior posts?). I had both a reasonably good sized budget and development staff. Department managers would call me from time to time and ask for a meeting to discuss a custom development need they had. I’d listen to the manager describe her problem. I’d ask how she was solving the problem today. Often it was a collection of manual processes and/or Excel spreadsheets.

More often than I’d like, I’d encourage the department manager to keep limping along with the home grown system. Why? That’s always the question. The honest, matter-of-fact answer is that good CIOs are good in part because they can discern what’s opportunistic and strategic from what’s not strategic. Invest in what provides competitive advantage and outsource or ignore the rest.

How do good CIOs feel turning department managers away empty handed? The good ones feel awful. Good CIOs want to solve problems. They want happy constituents. They want to empower people to do their best work. Today’s WSJ article suggests that these new do-it-yourself application builders can help you avoid IT. Actually, if they work and they’re secure and relatively open, IT will be their biggest fans. If they work, nobody’s going to have to sneak them in at all.

And that’s where we bring this post back to the blist product vision. blist is in large part a response to the disappointment I felt as a CIO whenever I turned a department manager away empty handed. We’re building a platform that empowers department managers to easily solve their own problems, strategic or otherwise. But we’re doing so not in spite of IT, but from the premise that this is the do-all platform that IT would build if they had the bandwidth in the first place. Isn’t the best technology the solution that just gets out of the way and lets people get their job done without friction? That’s what we’re building at blist.

It’s a win-win. The department manager gets the perfect solution - designed for her and by her. The CIO gets what he wants - a happy department manager.