A little IT knowledge would go a long way. When boards of directors lack the technical ability to recognise which parties are giving them an honest appraisal, they tend to believe those who want to tell them good news over those who would give them bad. So more than anything else the Unisys Australia-RACV case highlights the responsibility of the board of directors for avoiding IT disasters, says Karandan CEO Kate Behan, who authors distance education subjects for the Australian Computer Society (ACS). It also highlights the extreme difficulty of getting board directors with any kind of IT competence or knowledge, Behan says. "It's really the board's job to avoid this sort of stuff-up. But how the hell can they even know, because they don't have any knowledge?
"I think it really is a serious professional dilemma, that the preference is to pass good news upwards, but in fact in IT issues the board lacks the ability to tell who's really giving them an honest appraisal. So if they have several messages coming, which one do they go for? They go for the one that makes them happiest. Technically it's the board's fault,"Behan says.
Behan points out that a government investigation into business undergraduate education has shown there is less IT in undergrad-uate business courses in 2001 than there was when she was an academic 12 years ago. "I just find that overwhelmingly awful. I find it depressing. What it means is that the young grads come in, and they're no better than the people you've got [in place already] in terms of their conceptual grasp of IT. They're just going to pick it up as they lurch from bad project to bad project.
"Nobody tells them about processes. They learn about the function of an organisation, but most IT today is based on processes. The other day I had a little focus group; not one of them had heard the word Â'process' through their entire three years of undergraduate studies. It just didn't enter into anybody's vocabulary. One guy did an honours year and he did a business strategy subject, and in that business strategy subject throughout the entire semester, there was no mention of IT - in 2001!"
Behan says there is no mandatory IT component in something like 22 out of 33 of the business faculties in Australia. If students elect to do IT then they get taught by IT specialists with no business experience, or contextual understanding.
"So they come into your organisation, and you think they know it, because hell, they're a young graduate - and they've got no idea,"Behan says.
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