KEY POINTS:
Five years ago in Adelaide, former Commonwealth Bank of Australia chief executive David Murray used a speech at the high-powered World Congress on IT to lambast the technology sector.
Referring to the CBA's own experience of IT projects that had bombed, Murray declared the US IT industry had
"single-handedly wrecked the world economy" as a result of its penchant for hype and its history of under-delivering.
While slightly melodramatic, Murray's venting nevertheless typified the frustration many business leaders feel towards IT. Technology is a financial sinkhole. Their IT department promises much but always somehow fails to deliver.
You don't have to be a corporate leader to get frustrated with IT. The stomach-turning experience of realising that your PC has crashed, taking half a day's work with it, followed by a futile call to the corporate IT help desk (who are somehow not as helpful as their name implies) is usually enough to prompt most of us to question the value of technology.
Murray's tirade came back to haunt a group of senior IT executives this week. New Zealand's chief information officers (CIOs) - those responsible for inflicting IT upon the business world - had his sentiments regurgitated in front of them at the annual CIO Summit in Auckland.
For many CIOs, the summit is a chance to escape the daily grind of keeping the company servers running. The two-day conference allows them to take a step back and think about life's bigger picture issues, such as why their business colleagues sometimes treat them with such disdain.
Many non-IT business people saw IT as a "black art", said Aaron Kumove, managing director of Horizon Consulting and the man responsible for reviving the Murray quote at the summit.
"IT people, technologists in particular, are in some ways viewed as mysterious high priests of technology exorcising magical demons to make things happen - to people on the other side looking in they're not quite sure what's going on," Kumove told his CIO colleagues.
"When people can't understand something they get a bit wary. We in IT don't always do our best to alleviate those fears either. In fact, in many instances I think people in IT often prey on those fears, we take advantage. We use arcane language, we use technical terminology and we do that because we know if we can have knowledge that other people don't have perhaps there's some job security there."
The business/IT frustration goes both ways, however. Several summit speakers hinted at their annoyance that the value of IT was underrated because it is difficult to measure its true value to a company.
Peter Waterhouse, the Melbourne-based director of product marketing for global management software giant CA, talked about the "CIO conundrum" - businesses continue to increase their IT spend, but still question its value.
There is a realisation that good technology will give a business a competitive advantage, but IT often remains stuck in a "silo" and isolated from the rest of the company.
Waterhouse believes the way to start tackling the conundrum is for businesses to embrace a management concept known as project portfolio management (PPM).
The idea behind PPM is that managing projects as a group enables businesses to get a clearer perspective on where (or if) each project fits within the wider business strategy.
Under an effective PPM set-up, a company's IT department can, in theory, escape its silo and begin playing a significant role in driving business strategy and growth.
"It is new [IT] investment that is going to drive the business growth so we want to ensure that those new investments are aligned to the business strategy," says Waterhouse.
"IT is not there to fix problems any more, it's not a back-office function, it's not a supporting function, it's there to innovate. These are the sort of tools and processes that need to be in place to drive that."
Waterhouse says a string of acquisitions of niche PPM companies by large IT companies, including CA, over the past two years shows it is more than just the latest management fad.
"I think it will grow further as people see the need not only to just manage projects but the overall IT portfolio at an even higher level."
