News
Issue No. 24 - August/September 2005
Big Blue gets ready for big demand
Visiting South Australia with his company’s Business. Insight. Technology Forum 05 roadshow recently, IBM’s Australian chief, Phillip Bullock, made no bones about why his company was trying to inject flexibility into large-scale IT solutions.
“IT has cost too much,” says Philip.
“Y2K, then GST — companies invested very heavily in the space of 12 to 18 months (and were disappointed in results).
“The quantities that they are willing to invest have changed dramatically. Now, they ask ‘Do you have the ‘A’ team on this project?’”
What Philip is saying is, businesses undergoing structural change, who need more than off-the-shelf solutions to data handling problems, have learned to move IT “to centre stage” in the change process.
The need for productivity is what’s driving change. Australia, on the back of 13 straight years of growth, cannot sustain its growth by hiring more labour — the population isn’t there.
“(Greater) productivity is the only option,” Phillip says.
IBM determined this from a series of senior executive interviews conducted in 2004 which also found that 26% of corporations are undergoing change of some kind at any given time — and most feel they aren’t doing it well.
About 90% of CEOs intended to implement major changes during the next five years, being convinced that innovation is the key to growth.
Since human capital is finite, that i...
