Health and efficiency
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This year, IT executives across the globe should be setting themselves one crucial challenge if they want 2005 to be a prosperous and successful year: take the lead on a health and safety project.
January is of course the time for making (and all too often, breaking) resolutions. This year, IT executives across the globe should be setting themselves one crucial challenge if they want 2005 to be a prosperous and successful year: take the lead on a health and safety project.
The advice comes from analyst group Gartner, and is frankly one of the more off-the-wall ideas its analysts came up with as key goals for CIOs in 2005. On closer inspection, the imparted wisdom has less to do with the hazard potential of blazing data centres (see Information Age November 2004) and more to do with tackling the image of the CIO as the 'geek in the board room'.
Mark Raskimo, research director at Gartner explains: "CIOs need to build their credibility as team players. That means taking on non-IT projects and gaining respect for business, not just technical skills."
In boardrooms throughout Europe, the CIO is too often pigeonholed as purely the technical guy; a member of the management team that is too often seen as a barrier to organisational reinvigoration, explains Raskimo: "So much change is dependent on IT, the business needs an IT leader to remove constraints, promote innovation." Taking on a non-IT project may just help reposition the CIO as the change leader.
But it is worth striking a note of caution. One of Gartner's other recommendations is for executives to question the basic business assumptions being made about how 2005 will pan out. Half of those assumptions will be wrong in the next 12 months, says Gartner. Clearly its analysts are concerned that future gazing is still far from an exact science.
For while broadly global economic signals are positive, there is little to suggest a stellar year of growth in IT spending. Indeed, Gartner just increased its estimated probability of its "worst case scenario [happening]".
