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The Bitter Network Administrator |
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A Website Dedicated to Computer Professional...and some not so Professional |
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I
think this is a big mistake. What a company, which is a strong user of I.T.,
should have is a board member who keeps an eye on emerging new technologies and
has the skills and knowledge to evaluate whether they would be useful to the
company. They would also be useful in evaluating current working practises and
existing I.T. infrastructure in order to get the best out of existing
investment. In my experience most companies fail in this. I am not advocating
having a techie on the board of directors, that depth of knowledge is not
necessary in that position. I
once worked for an organisation that was very keen on using I.T. to its fullest
extent, but was hampered by this lack of technical knowledge at the top. The
directors would not talk to knowledgeable I.T. people before making decisions
because the directors kept their future plans completely to themselves until
they had made these decisions. I
used to wonder how top executives evaluated their ideas before making a final
decision on whether to proceed or not. I think I now know the answer. A lot of
them don’t. They dream up an idea, present it to the board and if they all
agree then the green light goes on. It is them left to others to try and figure
out how to turn the bosses dream into reality. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes
impossible. The biggest example of asking the impossible must surely be Ronald
Regan’s announcement of the original “Star Wars” defence system, complete
with energy weapons, lasers shooting down ICBMs. Reagan had obviously been
watching too many Sci-Fi movies and got confused between fiction and reality.
Just what sort of mad administration manages to announce to the world the future
deployment of technology that did not exist and was decades away from being
reality. The end result cost the U.S. taxpayer millions of dollars and Reagan
ended up looking a bigger fool than before. This sort of thing happens, albeit
on a smaller scale, a lot. As
information technology becomes increasing important to organisations of all
sizes then senior management knowledge needs to reflect that. If organisations
want to cut costs then they need to get the best out of their existing
investments and consider future investment from a much more knowledgeable
position. |
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Ask
any CEO how important information technology is to their company and the vast
majority would tell you that it is very important. Ask the same person if they
have a company director with strong I.T. knowledge and I expect the answer would
be no.
