Enron question: Is IT suited only to support business?

Computerworld - Even great ideas have their limits.
Following the debut of Enron Corp.'s Web-based power and gas trading platform, revenue at the Houston-based energy company jumped from $40.1 billion in 1999 to $100.8 billion the following year.
But after striking gold by combining its energy industry experience with a world-class trading system, Enron kept digging into new markets, convinced that its IT infrastructure had the Midas touch.
In 2000, Enron suffered a $60 million loss in its broadband business. It struggled in more than a dozen unfamiliar industries and crashed within a year.
Questionable partnerships, overaggressive investments and shady accounting practices top a long list of factors in Enron's downfall. But as they look for lessons from history's biggest bankruptcy, executives in all industries are questioning whether they, like Enron, spent so much time turning IT into a profit center that they lost sight of their organizations' core missions.
Back to the future?
Is it time to go back to the days when IT supported the business rather than became the business?
"I think [Enron's bankruptcy] is going to have a very sobering effect on boardrooms across the country," said Dick Hudson, former CIO at Houston-based oil drilling company Global Marine Inc. and now president of Hudson & Associates, an executive IT consulting firm in Katy, Texas. "You can almost see a bunker mentality taking hold in the senior suites."
Hudson said he has heard from CEOs who have been reviewing their risky IT ventures, such as application service provider spin-offs or extraneous e-commerce services, to make sure they don't have any investments that will blow up in their face. If they find any such ventures, he added, "they will probably retrench. It's a bottomless pit."
Charlie Lacefield, who retired from his position as CIO at Midland, Mich.-based Dow Corning Corp. three years ago, warned that although IT innovation is critical for companies to thrive in a global economy, those that stray too far from their core business strategies could see their plans backfire on them, as it did with Enron.
"If IT is not the core competency of the organization, then why throw away the core competency?" asked Lacefield, who now lives in North Carolina. "Why would you want to do that with so many IT companies out there . . . that already have a running start on you?"
Hudson said he thinks Enron started with a good business strategy and that if it hadn't pushed the envelope, it could well have been a successful Fortune 1,000 firm. But