In the mainframe world of the 1970s, CIOs had an easy time building their software development teams . You hired some COBOL programmers, a few system analysts, and some operators, gave them a manager, and you were set. Eighteen-month backlogs for application changes were common but CIOs didn't worry much because users had nowhere else to turn . In the PC world of the 1980s building a software development team was even easier. Unfortunately, this lead to many CIOs losing control over the application development process. Any department with a PC, a BASIC programmer, or maybe even just someone good at spreadsheet macros, could be in the software development business. When IT department backlogs were too long, many departments went off and implemented their own applications. This of course worked fairly well, at least until all those separate applications developed by different groups had to communicate or share data. What resulted, in many organizations, were islands of automation with little or no communication between them.