Once again local ICT expert Terry White has been invited to give a keynote address at the Ovum Industry Congress to be held in London on the 23rd /24th May.
White delivered the keynote presentation last year, where he challenged the 200 CIOs present to take IT to the next level. He showed that IT departments were increasingly irrelevant in business strategy and operations, and proposed that they change to “ACT- Applied Competitive Technologies” with the emphasis on “application and use of the technology rather than the technology itself”. His presentation was enthusiastically received, and showed that South African ideas are at the forefront of thought-leadership in IT.
This year, his keynote address is entitled: “Herding cats; getting your ducks in a row; aligning IT initiatives with the business- and other clichés”. Here he will challenge CIOs to get real with respect to what they do for the business. White says: “It’s a sad fact that investment in IT usually occurs because of two things: Firstly you have a problem that must be solved, and secondly there is some powerful executive with a pet project that just must be implemented irrespective of the returns. While neither reason is in itself inappropriate, business strategy execution, innovation, and competitive differentiation tend to be accidental rather than deliberate.” At the Ovum Industry Congress will present an ICT initiative portfolio and prioritisation process that is both simple and makes sense to the business. He says: “Where we’ve used this process, we find unexpected ICT initiatives rising to the top of investment plans. This is because we don’t look at pure returns on investment for IT initiatives, rather we examine a suite of ‘utility factors’ like risk, paths of action, sponsorship, ROI and others. This means that IT investments make business sense, not because there’s a burning platform or a burning sponsor.”
