As part of Computing's Tomorrow's IT Leaders campaign, we talk to the UK's top chief information officers (CIOs) to find out their views on the role of IT leaders and how this will change in the post-recessionary world.
In this video Martin Schofield, retail operations director at Harvey Nichols, talks to Computing senior reporter Angelica Mari, Colin Beveridge, chairman of the Better Practice Forum and David Roberts, chief executive of blue-chip user group The Corporate IT Forum, about his views on the future of IT leadership.
Schofield maintains that the IT department is an anachronism and future IT leaders will have to be business all-rounders - Schofield himself balances responsibility for IT, logistics and store operations.
Click here to watch the first installment of this two-part interview, in which Schofield talks about his plans for creation of IT leadership at Harvey Nichols.
Martin Schofield's success at Harvey Nichols clearly results from his being able to develop IT as a business consultancy resource that works across the company's different operations, irrespective of whether the project is IT or non-IT directed.
However, at Centiq, we are still seeing many organisations where the IT infrastructure is still unwieldy, focused on internal and external customers' tactical requirements instead of being geared to business units' needs. Important, if non-high profile strategic tasks such as rationalisation of applications, server consolidation and tiering of data into high and non-high availability categories, are frequently postponed or not even identified, leaving a sprawling IT resources that cannot respond to changing market dynamics or simply consume excessive staff time and resources.
We are still surprised at the number of apparently well-run companies that are nevertheless maintaining non-critical data on expensive disk arrays or servers running applications that should have been retired months ago.
Company CIOs that address or outsource these business integrity issues to infrastructure specialists can slim down their IT infrastructure will achieve more responsive IT operations. This will leave precious staff resources to be focused on support and advising colleagues right across the business.
In a continuing downturn, this approach might enable the CIO to improve customer responsiveness to help maintain market share or develop innovations to extend the brand into new markets or simply support new sales strategies. This approach could make all the difference to a struggling business or to hasten a company's growth in its core markets.
Glyn Heath, Managing Director, Centiq Ltd
Posted by: Glyn Heath 26 Oct 2009
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