With conventional information-technology companies in a protracted slump, investors are taking a fresh look at companies working on renewable energy.

Selling Federally subsidized management systems to welfare departments was a separate and much bigger business, the province of huge information-technology companies.

Northeast Consulting in Boston specializes in scenario work for information-technology companies.

It is also home to a growing number of biotech, information-technology and publishing companies.

Too often, they say, information-technology companies do little more than issue vague statements of intent, all the while failing to commit resources or management time to the project.

"At a certain point, Americans began thinking that they were the ideal," said Anatoly M. Karachinsky, president of Information Business Systems, one of Russia's largest information-technology companies.

The excesses were not confined to information-technology companies.

Dr. Johnson, 30, is a systems analyst at Princeton Consultants Inc., a management and information-technology company in Princeton.

Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro, Indian information-technology companies, withdrew their staffs from Bahrain following the three-month, state-of-emergency declaration.

A crucial question is whether Britain's small information-technology companies will ever grow big.