By Will Sturgeon, 30 November 2005 16:20
NEWS
A worrying number of UK CIOs are failing in the vital task of IT governance and understanding what assets they have within the organisation.
Although most agree they need to have a clear picture of what assets they own before they can even begin to manage their IT effectively, more than a third of CIOs responding to a recent Mori survey said they fall some way short.
John Menzies Distribution IT director Frank Coyle, who didn't take part in the research, told silicon.com that heads of IT must have "total visibility" but said he knows of many peers who do not. "However, they all believe they should," he added, in common with 88 per cent of respondents to the Mori poll.
But worse still, businesses are riddled with a culture whereby CIOs are damned if they do and damned if they don't tighten up on asset management, with one senior IT boss warning his peers walk a fine line of inefficiency on one hand and being branded "red tape monkeys" on the other.
Paul Broome, IT director at 192.com, said "it is often seen by business managers as negative IT red tape" when their companies are keen to roll out new technology and react quickly to problems which arise.
Coyle agreed that the tendency of enterprise IT to grow "erratically" may well be to blame.
He said: "This is likely to be as a direct result of inflated expectations and the resultant uncontrolled implementation of projects."
The Mori research formed the basis of the inaugural CIO IT Management Index, published by CA. Kirsten Cox, principal consultant at CA Technology Services, told silicon.com the situation owes a lot to the way companies buy technology in a "reactive rather than proactive manner".
She added: "It's all very ad hoc."
Cox said companies would rather plan for what they want to achieve than take stock of what they already have.
Other factors which contribute towards 61 per cent of respondents saying the challenge is getting harder include the merger of systems and hardware following the consolidation of companies and also the fact many CIOs will often have come to companies which already have many assets in place, so they are playing catch-up from day one.
A move to greater mobility and the tendency for a growing number of assets to exist in geographically diverse locations and outside the four walls of the office are also challenges.
Christopher Linfoot, IT director at LDV Vans, said: "The need to support mobile workers with a variety of technologies such as wi-fi, BlackBerry and the like means the scope of the IT portfolio is now much broader than it has been in the past and so obtaining a fully integrated view is extremely difficult."
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. Brian Clegg
In my experience CIOs can fail to understand the assets in their office, let alone their organization.
A number of years ago when I worked for a corporate, as an experiment I unplugged the CIO's management information terminal (yes, it was a number of years ago). A month later, I was back in his office, and it was still unplugged.
Until CIOs have a grasp of technology themselves, rather than being general managers with no IT knowledge, they can't hope to keep on top of their assets (whether hardware or human).
2. Chris Minchin (FAST Corporate Services)
Asset management needn’t be a bureaucratic nightmare for CIOs. Provided simple policies and procedures are put in place first, an initial audit will provide all the information he or she needs to manage the IT environment more efficiently. Asset management tools are so sophisticated these days that, once the initial audit is complete, it’s relatively straightforward to keep on top of things.
Proper asset management can identify huge cost savings by identifying unused or infrequently used hardware and software. It’s therefore in the CIO’s interest to undergo some short-term pain to complete the initial audit because, in the long-term, it will pay dividends.
3. Steve Turner (Stratic)
You wouldn’t buy another couple of cars to add to the company fleet without first checking that you didn’t already have several hiding away in the car park. Yet it is almost accepted that new technology will be bought on a reactive basis with no clear knowledge of what resources your business already has.
There are plenty of tools available on the market that claim to help your business effectively manage its IT environment. However, IT asset management can be much more than a “red tape” counting exercise. Run it alongside a cost optimisation process and you can identify areas of under or over investment.
“Red tape monkey”? Not if you’re the CIO able to demonstrate his value to the board.