CIOs bamboozled by asset management

A worrying number of UK CIOs are failing in the vital task of IT governance and understanding what assets they have within the organisation.

Although most agree they need to have a clear picture of what assets they own before they can even begin to manage their IT effectively, more than a third of CIOs responding to a recent Mori survey said they fall some way short.

The need to support mobile workers with a variety of technologies... means the scope of the IT portfolio is now much broader than it has been in the past and so obtaining a fully integrated view is extremely difficult.

-- Christopher Linfoot, IT director, LDV Vans

John Menzies Distribution IT director Frank Coyle, who didn't take part in the research, told silicon.com that heads of IT must have "total visibility" but said he knows of many peers who do not. "However, they all believe they should," he added, in common with 88 per cent of respondents to the Mori poll.

But worse still, businesses are riddled with a culture whereby CIOs are damned if they do and damned if they don't tighten up on asset management, with one senior IT boss warning his peers walk a fine line of inefficiency on one hand and being branded "red tape monkeys" on the other.

Paul Broome, IT director at 192.com, said "it is often seen by business managers as negative IT red tape" when their companies are keen to roll out new technology and react quickly to problems which arise.

Coyle agreed that the tendency of enterprise IT to grow "erratically" may well be to blame.

He said: "This is likely to be as a direct result of inflated expectations and the resultant uncontrolled implementation of projects."

The Mori research formed the basis of the inaugural CIO IT Management Index, published by CA. Kirsten Cox, principal consultant at CA Technology Services, told silicon.com the situation owes a lot to the way companies buy technology in a "reactive rather than proactive manner".

She added: "It's all very ad hoc."

Cox said companies would rather plan for what they want to achieve than take stock of what they already have.

Other factors which contribute towards 61 per cent of respondents saying the challenge is getting harder include the merger of systems and hardware following the consolidation of companies and also the fact many CIOs will often have come to companies which already have many assets in place, so they are playing catch-up from day one.

A move to greater mobility and the tendency for a growing number of assets to exist in geographically diverse locations and outside the four walls of the office are also challenges.

Christopher Linfoot, IT director at LDV Vans, said: "The need to support mobile workers with a variety of technologies such as wi-fi, BlackBerry and the like means the scope of the IT portfolio is now much broader than it has been in the past and so obtaining a fully integrated view is extremely difficult."