“It’s all about relationships,” says Dave Witts, head of IT at North Cornwall District Council.

“As with most things in life, there has to be trust and understanding between you and your boss, but you want to be seen as someone that can solve things, not create more problems for them.”

As a result, his approach when dealing with suggestions from senior executives that he does not necessarily agree with is to establish the key business requirement from the outset.

For example, a few weeks ago, the district council’s chief executive came back from a local government review meeting with other authorities in the area and asked Witts to implement videoconferencing technology. He had reservations about the proposal.

“So we discussed it and talked about what the real business need was,” says Witts. “The main objective was to save people from travelling all around the county, but my point was that videoconferencing isn’t used a lot in Cornwall anyway and if it were effective, we’d be using it already.”

When he explored the matter further, Witts discovered that the underlying aim was to reduce the number of meetings and to make those that took place more effective - and enabling executives to share documents in advance was a key means of achieving the aim.

“Once I understood the requirements, we could talk through the best solutions and our discussion led to a number of them, with videoconferencing not being
one,” says Witts.

But he warns that in such discussions, it is crucial not to let technology get in the way because it will only ever be part of the answer.

“A key mistake is putting the technology before the business. For some, technology is the be all and end all, but it’s only one part of the solution and one of the issues is that not all bosses understand the value that technology can bring,” says Witts.

“Good communication is crucial, as is being able to put things in terms that non-technical people can understand, to prevent IT being percieved as just a high-cost centre.”

He makes a point of attending corporate strategy groups to understand what other services are doing, so that he can help and work with rather than against them.

“IT is often seen as being down in the dungeons and not knowing what’s happening in the business and so it’s often considered to bring more problems than solutions,” says Witts.

“But if you build respect, you’ll be listened to and that means speaking the language of business.”