Reading Between the Lines
from
March/April 2007
by Colin Leinster
On the face of it, the extent to which so many directors seem disengaged from their company’s information-technology strategy is alarming. Are they negligent? Scared? Or lazy? It surely isn’t ignorance. As the findings on these pages make clear, most of the 455 respondents to the Corporate Board Member/Deloitte Consulting survey acknowledge that IT is a key to their company’s success. (The complete survey results are available at boardmember.com/PDFs/ITStrategies.pdf.)
Kenneth Porrello, Deloitte Consulting’s senior strategy principal, interviewed 35 directors and senior executives and found evidence of this gap. But Porrello also discovered a number of individuals and organizations that are leading the way to a more integrated view of technology and business—something he calls “a collective awakening among directors that information technology is critical to their companies.“
Why don’t more directors play a stronger role in determining IT strategy? Why don’t they insist that IT be discussed more often in boardrooms and measure what are usually gigantic investments against results more often and more thoroughly? A common obstacle to doing all this, Porrello found, was that old nemesis, time. Directors and CEOs he interviewed said they just didn’t have enough of it to go around—and that keeping pace with, and on top of, all the governance reforms of the past five years has made time management that much more challenging.
IT neglect, in this respect, is another victim of Sarbanes-Oxley. But that’s an excuse that has run its course.
