Raikes, who oversees business and productivity services at Microsoft, kicked off the daylong meeting by talking about what it would take to "reinvent" productivity. "Economics needs to find a better way to reflect the new models of the Information Age," Raikes said. "Instead of focusing on outputs, we need to focus on outcomes."

Raikes framed the productivity issue in Microsoft terms, such as how to demonstrate to skeptical financial executives the extent to which instant messaging can make an organization more profitable, and how you can get the funding you need by calculating the ROI of deploying Tablet PC hardware.

Despite references to 20 years of discussions about the "productivity paradox," the speakers made it clear that the specter of not knowing how to prove, in tangible terms, the relationship between IT and enterprise-level economic results is still haunting the IT industry. Their anxiety reminded me somehow of The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. It was apparent that the vendor ambassadors were walking around without much substantive cover in the form of a way to prove -- in commonly accepted financial terms -- that the customers' IT spending makes a verifiable contribution to profits.

We are now in an era when almost no applications of computers are amenable to analysis by proven industrial engineering methods -- unlike in the days when computers were applied to automation of clerical labor.

Customer IT executives declare consistently that they have an urgent need for new techniques to address the productivity gains of workers whose observable output is hard to measure. The articulate Raikes made that clear when he said that the goal of the council was to "redefine productivity and create a framework for Information Age economics. ... The current measures fail to measure the contributions of IT."

If we can overlook the council's self-serving purposes, its objectives are commendable. Unfortunately, "The Information Work Productivity Primer," which was distributed to the participants to provide an explanation of the council's thinking, didn't offer anything that could be used to win over skeptical CFOs. It defined the issue and provided a review of theoretical work that would be useless in preparing for an IT budget review. The primer and the talks didn't offer vulnerable CIOs much hope that they could survive a grilling from corporate budget analysts with the help of tools that someday could become available from the council.

The problem with the work of the council is its exclusive vendor orientation. It's unlikely that credible solutions will come out of its efforts until the vendors also include material participation from CIOs and CFOs. Productivity and profits from the application of IT -- the outputs that Raikes talked about passionately -- are delivered by customers and not by suppliers. It's the customer's IT executives who must prove that their company's IT spending is productive and profitable!

The council must overcome its apparent assumption that the answers to the productivity paradox can be found in researching high-level government statistics and not in detailed data that reports on the results of corporate profit centers. The plain fact is that all aspects of business are based on what the accountants report as corporate results. When corporate review committees examine IT budgets, they will first translate funding requests into financial impacts as measured by the accountants before they will listen to all of the other promises.

A more realistic view of how to measure corporate information productivity, as seen from CIO and CFO points of view, is already available to Computerworld readers. If you'd like to explore how to perform such calculations for your organization, as well as check whether your company was ranked among the global 1,319 firms in my information productivity index, have a look at the report "Defining and Measuring Information Productivity". A comparison of where your company stands in productivity relative to its competitors could be your best opener when asking for IT money.

Paul A. Strassmann (paul@strassmann.com) has had to explain billions in IT spending at General Foods Corp., Kraft Foods Inc., Xerox Corp., the Department of Defense and NASA.