Professor Stijn Viaene tries to get IT professionals off their island
09 Oct 2008Professor Stijn Viaene recently became head of the Operations and Technology Management Centre (OTMC), a department that brings together expertise in fields such as process management, ICT and project management, service operations and supply chain management. For his own research, Professor Viaene is concentrating in particular on aligning Business Intelligence with Business IT. He talks about the tension in this field with enthusiasm and drive – a professor dedicated to his work.
Professor
Viaene is looking into means of using technology to increase the effectiveness
and efficiency of managers’ decision making and ways in which to create dialogue
between IT departments and other personnel in the company. “If the walls between
the IT department and the rest of the company do not quickly disappear,” he
explains”, “then many IT departments will be written off.”
He observes how both parties are involved in a monologue. “The employees in a company are no longer the unknowing of the past. There is a generation now at work that has huge self-confidence and who enthusiastically work with the web. And over the past few years, the majority of tools have improved in terms of accessibility and user-friendliness.”
Professor Viaene observes that many employees see the IT department as a burden. “They try to avoid having to deal with the department as much as possible. There’s a sense of frustration caused by bad experiences of working together, expectations that aren’t met, a lack of understanding, and so on. So why not just do it yourself? Or why not outsource the whole lot to an external partner that is supposedly better at listening to local demands? But in so doing, the company unintentionally jeopardises operational management, particularly at enterprise level. There is even a risk that process and information management are accidentally thrown out, like throwing out the baby with the bath water, so to speak.”
According to the professor, IT professionals have to learn how to better communicate and apply their technology to their colleagues’ needs. “Many an IT department works with its users in a pretty rigid and regimented way, and that often leads to irritation within the company. People wonder if the IT people are listening, or even wanting to listen. What’s more, a lack of understanding for the real complexity of the situation and a certain level of encouragement from suppliers mean that some end-users are starting to think that everything nowadays should be like a commodity flowing freely. And that’s why IT departments are treading on thin ice. Is it a question of marketing? Yes, of course. But there’s more to it than that. We need to be constantly on the lookout for different, better ways of encouraging and managing cooperation. It shouldn’t be just one way.”
“There are lots of applications that can be perfectly well developed or hosted by third parties – even if they are in Russia, India or China. The world has become somewhat flatter. But as a company you then need to invest in the right relationship management competences. Developers in far-off countries can have quite different ways of thinking, working and behaving towards each other. And after all, you can hardly let someone else decide your business strategy or key processes! What’s more, we need to ensure that Europe stays on the map. If we truly mean what we say about wanting to develop a knowledge economy here, then we have to commit to technology. Having systems developed elsewhere isn’t a problem, but we have to be the ones who excel in developing innovative applications and uses – and that’s not the case at the moment.”
It is just one of Professor Viaene’s frustrations: “Compared to the rest of Europe, Belgium is a fairly conservative market. We’re not really prepared to invest in information systems. We should be aiming for high risk, high potential projects to form the basis of our IT portfolio, but Belgians like to play it safe and wait to see how things develop. It’s how we are but I’m afraid this prudence won’t bear much fruit in the future. We really have to come out of our shell.”
There also needs to be a change of mentality within companies. “The Chief Information Officer (CIO) needs to take a seat in the board of directors and with the CEO,” says Professor Viaene. “Only then can CIOs achieve anything as it is only then that can they can help think about information and communication solutions that use IT to solve the problems and challenges of management at strategic, structural and operational level.”
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