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By Joey Gardiner, 9 March 2000 00:20

NEWS IT directors need to take control of their companies' software and hardware assets if they are to succeed in putting technology at the heart of business, according to senior industry figures taking part in a London debate yesterday. Geoff Webster, chief executive of the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST), claimed IT departments often have no accurate idea of the equipment present in their organisations. He said: "Most of the blame has to fall fairly firmly on the IT director, for a lack of attention to IT management." Simon Young, UK vice president of infrastructure management software company MainControl, which hosted the debate, said this neglect reduces responsiveness to changes in business which, in turn, erodes the IT department's credibility. "The IT department must run itself as a business to be credible to the rest of the company," he said. "Part of this is remaining in control of company IT inventories." Gary Hardy, director at Arthur Andersen's Computer Risk Management Practice, agreed: "As we move into the ebusiness sphere it is clear the companies who do well will be those with world class computing systems and a great structure for managing IT," he said. Dipesh Patel, operations and commercial manager for BG International - formerly British Gas - said the difficulty for the IT director is conducting accurate audits. He warned: "The question is this: how do you convince people to register everything - right down to their PalmPilots and mobiles - so that the IT department can be in control of the equipment? There is a danger of being too dictatorial about this." The round table's conclusions followed studies published by research company Gartner Group which revealed that 70 per cent of organisations have a 30 per cent discrepancy between a planned IT inventory and their actual IT inventory.