Business opportunities present new IT challenges and IT
directors should be thinking ahead so that they are prepared for a
changing business and regulatory environment, says Ben
Booth
The only certainty in business is change. It is the role of the
IT director to deliver reliable services in a changing business
environment, and yet remain in control of a fluid technological and
regulatory agenda.
To earn a place in the business' top team, he or she must be seen
to provide value across the organisation outside of the purely
technological area.
The IT industry now appears to have bottomed out and is about to
launch into a further round of switchback boom and bust. The user
community has had an opportunity to negotiate prices with
suppliers, to retain staff and to hire staff at sensible rates, but
in many areas it has also had to reduce costs and has had limited
scope for new initiatives.
Even in those sectors which have been growing, businesses have been
cautious about IT investment. Nevertheless, e-business is becoming
the dominant mode for internal business processes.
Time for growth
The business environment is turning to growth. The challenge will
be to deliver more, but with only a limited increase in resources
and in a sellers' market which will favour suppliers.
The public sector, which continues to experience growth, will be
affected. At Mori we have seen continued growth in public sector
areas matched by increased business in key private sectors,
including telecoms, IT, business services and human
resources.
Keeping abreast of technology requires an enquiring team and good
professional advisers, but is traditionally one of the
technology-based IT director's core skills. Much of the recent
technology change is driven by suppliers and may not deliver
significant advantage. Major upgrades are expensive but disruptive
- the IT director must judge the optimum time for change.
In times of low IT spend one of the suppliers' gambits has been to
attempt to divert the limited in-house IT spend to external
suppliers. Such writings as the controversial "IT doesn't matter"
article by Nicholas Carr in the Harvard Business Review have
encouraged top management to see IT as unable to bring competitive
advantage, and therefore as being best handled externally.
The concept of "utility" or "on-demand" computing follows this
model. Outsourcing and offshoring are options which require serious
consideration, but will not be applicable in all cases. We face an
uphill struggle to convince business of the value of IT
investment.
Open source
Open source is another distraction which threatens to head the IT
director off-course in pursuit of an apparently low-cost
alternative - there are some applications where it has great value,
but a wholesale move to the platform remains a gamble.
Although we may be suspicious of Microsoft's ambitions, those with
long memories will recall the days when most operating systems were
proprietary and the supposed "open systems" consisted of many
incompatible varieties of Unix.
In the next 12 to 18 months we will hear more about the potential
of telecoms and computing convergence, though this has been on the
agenda for at least 20 years. Voice over IP is one of the key
technologies, with separate (but confusing) applications at the Lan
and Wan. IT directors will have to decide what these have to offer
and whether the risk and cost of conversion is worthwhile.
There are also services on offer from telcos and ISPs but the
challenge will be to select those that can provide a service as
well as engineering excellence. Home-working and the "always on"
connection for mobile staff are increasingly important.
The regulatory environment is increasingly complicated and, with
security, has the potential to absorb vast amounts of IT spend with
little or no business advantage. The trick must be to get the
balance right to satisfy the regulators and keep our systems secure
without diverting resources.
IT directors need to balance conflicting priorities, but we should
not forget we have to deliver reliable services at an affordable
price. Over and above the core deliverables, our wide knowledge and
skills provide the background for the chief information officer to
identify new business opportunities and the technologies to support
them.
Ben Booth is chairman of the BCS Elite group and IT director at
research group Mori
