Recently CXO Advisor’s Research Director, Terry White, made the keynote presentation at the Ovum Industry Congress in London.

White’s message was based on three premises: Firstly that because technology was a commodity, and organisations could not gain a competitive advantage through the technology alone, organisations’ advantage would only be gained through HOW they used the technology in innovative ways. This means that technology is no longer at the centre stage of IT departments’ activities – rather they should be concentrating fiercely on how their organisations use technology. Secondly, White quoted the late management guru Peter Drucker who said that IT people would become the bystanders in their organisations rather than the superheroes that that had been, because of their steadfast inability to do the ‘I’ in IT – they were doing the ‘T’. The third premise was based on many CIOs’ reactions to White’s book: ‘What business really wants from IT’. CIOs quizzed White on whether the title should rather have been ‘What business really NEEDS from IT.’ White maintains that the focus on needs rather than wants distracts IT people from the real contribution that they should be making.

By combining these three premises, White proposed to the Congress of some 200 international CIOs that IT’s role needs to change – their name, and their focus. White suggested that the acronym ACT (Applied Competitive Technologies) better describes what role business wants from IT.

White’s presentation got the Congress off to a forward-thinking start, with many CIOs approaching White after his talk, to see how they could change their department’s focus from IT to ACT. A number of vendors also approached White saying that their clients needed to hear his message.

White remarked: ‘It worries me how many IT departments think that their role is m erely the enablement of business operations through technology, when it is patently clear that CEOs want a lot more from them.’

Craig Terblanche, Managing Director of CXO Advisor said: ‘We see this great reception of White’s message as an indicator of the thought-leadership that we provide to our clients, and we have been approached by a number of international organisations to help them rethink the role and contribution of IT (now ACT) in their organisations. Our 3 Role Model™ management framework has been developed specifically to address this transition in any organisation. It is nice to see how well our investment in this approach is being received both here in South Africa as well as globally’.