Many chief information officers (CIOs) in South Africa, and worldwide, make decisions based on insufficient information when implementing technology, says Eric Sommer, technical director of CommerceQuest SA.
According to Sommer, this happens frequently in large enterprise companies in South Africa.
"We do enterprise application integration in sectors like the financial services industry and the retail, manufacturing and distribution sectors. Some of the CIOs, technical staff and business analysts we speak to come to us with a preconceived idea of a `product` and how much it is going to cost them.
"When they then discover that it will cost more and take longer, they may have painted themselves into a corner for the simple reason that they did not set the correct expectations with the business and budgetary managers. The truth is, they haven`t properly investigated what their business` requirements are or the process involved in the implementation of a solution," he says.
While they may have looked at the product in some detail, Sommer says factors like development, testing, implementation costs, after sales support, annual licensing and training are often not properly explored. The price of the product and length of implementation quoted to the board or decision-makers is therefore often completely incorrect.
Sommer points out that technology sometimes `fails` because of the customer`s expectations not being set out correctly and it is imperative that CIOs use the correct methodology, implementing solutions and not products.
Should a CIO want to use technology to address a problem, the problem or need must first be properly understood, Sommer says. "The technology should be investigated by reading up on the technology, talking to companies who are using it and getting white papers on it. After that, extensive consultation with the vendors and implementers in a collaborative way, ie: a partnership, to deeply explore the requirements, needs, wants, costs and outcomes are required," suggests Sommer.
Questions like: "Does the technology perform the required tasks well, poorly, or not at all," need to be asked. The technology`s features should also be graded into must-haves, like-to-haves and nice-to-haves. If the product does other things that weren`t thought of in the first place, these need to be examined to see whether they are required or not.
"And after all of this and any other relevant questions, the CIO can then ask how much it costs and how long it will take to implement. Armed with that information he can request approval on the project," he says.
"The CIO position is therefore not a `bean counting` position," Sommer maintains. "CIOs need to be technically-minded and if they don`t understand all the systems they are responsible for, then they need to have people they can trust reporting to them who do. The CIO position has to be the place where the technologists who want the technology no matter what the cost and those responsible for the business and the budget meet and are able to get the answers they need about whether the solution should be implemented or not," adds Sommer.
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