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Devil's Advocate: Blame it on the users
Are they what's holding back IT?

By Martin Brampton

Published: Tuesday 09 November 2004

Everyone always says IT workers need to better understand business - but, asks Martin Brampton, could the real problem be business people who don't understand IT? Or perhaps it's the end users that are preventing organisations from reaping the rewards of their IT investments?

The industry skills council, e-Skills UK, has published a report called IT Insight: Trends and UK Skills Implications with the aid of analyst house Gartner. Much of the story has been heard before - a skills shortage in the UK and the need for combined technical and business skills figure prominently. But the implication these are new issues is counterproductive.

The link between business and IT has always been complex. Reports like this commonly imply building systems used to be the preserve of technicians, apparently acting autonomously. Yet are we really to believe that, say, cheque clearing systems were built entirely by IT people, without any consultation with the management of banks?

Indeed, much of what counts as banking is largely defined by IT systems. Cheque clearing is conceptually simple. Over a period of years, though, banks have evolved a range of ever more complex financial products. Often, these are the work of mathematicians, economists and computer experts - technicians every one.

Clearly there are other aspects, such as commercial viability, sales and marketing, risk management and so on. All the same, in a number of respects, IT has created business possibilities, not merely reflected them.

A more accurate characterisation of the situation is that the processes that are built into new systems are becoming harder to understand. Basic money transactions are at the core of banking, but their mechanisms are relatively easy to understand for both IT and commercial people. The problems being tackled nowadays are harder for everyone to understand.

In fact, although the complaint is often made that IT people fail to understand business can frequently be turned round. The problem is often that business people also fail to understand business, as well as lacking insight into IT.

Another theme that constantly re-emerges is that IT skills are linked to business success. This also mis-describes an important issue. Research long ago concluded that although successful companies spend more on IT, it was impossible to show the success was a result of deploying IT. On the contrary, it is believed that it is a consequence of more general success.

Where the report does strike a chord is in its emphasis on the need for appropriate skills in the vast army of users. Again, this was long ago established as a critical factor. For example, major airlines concluded it was not the possession of uniquely sophisticated reservation systems that gave them an advantage, it was the skill of staff that used them. Hence owners of systems were quite prepared to rent out their use to other airlines.

But this kind of skill is too easily overlooked in general reports, which tend to focus on more basic abilities. No doubt with the ubiquity of computers, it is as well for much of the work force to be able to find the keys on a keyboard and to know that to shut down a Windows system, you press the Start button. But it is the more advanced and less easily taught skills that really make a difference.

Outsourcing inevitably comes into the picture. An interesting problem is that if more junior tasks are outsourced, it becomes much harder to create a training route to advanced skills. Although a reader was right to chide me for failing to mention cost advantage as a driver for outsourcing in a recent column, that is surely a short term and relatively minor consideration.

Simply finding needed advanced skills by outsourcing is a much more strategic consideration. But the scope for both this and cost leverage may well be limited. There are already signs that two factors are working against both. Individuals with good specialist skills are emigrating from low to high wage countries for obvious reasons. At the same time, the countries best endowed with skilled people are themselves showing signs of rapid economic growth and the increasingly need to deploy those skills for their own use.

Maybe we could do better in all these areas if we were more thorough in our analysis of the problems. Simple answers to complex questions rarely work.