'Flawed' ICT plans costing millions
Around the world, this translates into hundreds of billions of US dollars annually, according to an IT expert.
Dimension Data services director of Middle East and Africa, Derek Wilcocks, said globally CEOs are disempowering their CIO.
“The company leader, lacking vision to understand the increasing power of technology in enabling business growth, fails to empower his chief of information and instead gives his CFO free rein to manage the information function.
“The CFO manages by placing an excessively short-term focus on costs, a fact that usually results in disempowering the CIO.
“In our experience the CEO simply doesn’t support the CIO in the right ways,” Wilcocks said.
He argued that a short-term cost-cutting approach results in huge financial losses, operational chaos, the ever-increasing cost of managing multiple supplier relationships, and most importantly ICT’s failure to actively support business objectives.
And while CIOs must take some responsibility, in too many cases the structures put in place around them makes them powerless to change it, according to Dimension Data.
Wilcocks believes this is a pattern that is consistent around the world, adding, however, that it is particularly pervasive in South Africa.
“While South African business leaders are clearly among the most entrepreneurial in the world, our failing is that our leaders hamper the potential of their business by failing to impose operational best practice implementing the right systems and processes that will enable true and sustainable business growth.
“In our experience, South African business leaders see ICT as a cost and not as a potential business driver.
“With this mindset it is clear to see that South African CIOs not only start off at a disadvantage but struggle to get out of the starting gates,” He said.
Pointing out the role of the CIO, Wilcocks said: “The role of the CIO is so designed that he has no choice but to sweat the small stuff.
“He is focused on the design, installation and maintenance of systems, but that is only 15-30% of the total IT spend.
“The remaining 75-80% of spend goes to monitoring, reporting and managing of suppliers and optimisation of the complete IT function. It is here that the focus of the CIO really should
fall.”
He stressed that many CEOs have erred in the manner in which IT is applied.
“The CEO has messed up because the way he is measuring performance and the job he has created for the CIO is flawed. It’s logical, but it’s flawed.
“The fact that he is putting the CFO in place to manage the CIO means that the only measurement is short-term cost reduction.”
The result is that the tenure for a CIO is the shortest among board positions, Wilcocks concluded.
ICT plans and cost – give your views
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