Technology responsibility: Get it right

Zarella says a natural human instinct is to make something easier, or more comfortable. Unfortunately this can lead to a “set and forget” mentality occurring throughout a corporate culture -- unless the organisation's management is geared to counter such complacency.

“Unfortunately, technology is often bought, installed and forgotten and it's run on a set and forget and basis. It is true. Everyone is very busy and challenged with finding reasonable time and resources to ensure that everything is running the way it should, but it has to happen, it's imperative,” he says, acknowledging that in many companies mitigating risk is often a reactive rather than proactive function.

Given the corporate imperatives of beating the competition, striving for excellence, and best practices, Zarrella cites anecdotal evidence suggesting that some management teams may be proactively contributing to a projects failure.

“Organisations don't manage project risk very well. An IT project usually encompasses key business areas -- yet so often the wrong people are put in charge, with inadequate reporting lines to management. I know of situations where the people running such projects have been put there not because they are the best people for the job, but because they are disliked and put there with a hope that they will fail.

“When there is a big project going on [often] everyone knows it's chances of success or failure. If there is any indication that the project is going to fail [sometimes] people are going to be inclined to put their worst people on it,” Zarella says, adding that successful projects have very different profiles.

“The ones that succeed have every relevant executive there -- CEO, CFO, COO -- it makes an enormous difference. The big guys are involved and they don't walk away.”

Zarrella says shareholders and stakeholders would be surprised with how many boards would not know what projects they are running.

“I know of organisations which are literally running hundreds of projects. I know of a situation in which I was talking to eight executives reporting to one MD. They were very stressed out, working early, working late, overworked, the whole bit.

“We did a quick project audit or stocktake. I spent an hour with them working a whiteboard. They started with 52 projects which they called mission critical. They had a team of 10 guys doing a project that no one actually wanted. After the hour, I left them to continue the process, and within a week they had got the amount down to just 12 mission critical projects. They are now much less stressed and much more valuable to the business,” Zarrella says.

“I was astonished that a company board didn't have an accurate list detailing the status of all its projects. It had no idea. How can you run a board when you have no idea of all the projects you are running?”

To dispense their technology responsibilities effectively, Zarella says boards must have the following:
* A clear strategic intent of IT
* Be aware of IT risks and be prepared to mitigate them
* Conduct regular IT reviews at board level
* Map, manage, audit all project management activity

“There is a common expectation that your IT executive can do every project and do every project well. Often this is not a reasonable expectation, and the associated risk must be mitigated with better prioritisation of activities and resources,” he says.

“We expect so many functions to be handled by our IT execs -- but the reality is that by the time they handle security, compliance, application deployment, risk mitigation, administration, maintenance, they don't have much time for strategic matters. They can't deliver,” he says.