Don't blame it on the techies
Nigel Green, an executive consultant with Capgemini, argues that IT does not fully deserve its reputation for missed deadlines and poor communication. He says that: “IT consulting has moved away from the technical space into the business space. The decisions we make aren't really about the IT, but about what fundamental and behavioural aspects in businesses we're trying to support.”
11 November 2007
Publication
Green, runner-up in the IT Consultant of the Year in the MCA Consultant of the Year Awards 2007, recently worked on projects involving the criminal justice system, including a 10-year project to build an IT infrastructure, and says much of the work was not about the information systems themselves, but the behaviour of the groups that would be using it.
“An example would be where the police service, because of the way it operates, would need to have a system that can give them information very speedily,” says Green, “whereas the Crown Prosecution Service has a different value system. It’s all about the tension created by different needs, and if you don’t acknowledge that, then the system won’t be used by either party.”
Green has been in IT consulting for 25 years and says that his thinking has moved away from the technology side of things to the business arena. “Challenges don’t really fall into the technology space,” he says, “It is more about the way that IT is applied. IT has to respect the very business system that it is designed to support, and this way of thinking is much more interesting than talking about server infrastructure.”
To read the full article at TimesOnline, click here.
To find out more about Capgemini’s Technology Services, click here.
To read Capgemini’s CTO Blog, click here.
