In the first of an exclusive two-part series, IT executive development specialist Brinley Platts reveals his secrets for CIOs looking to best leverage their personal and business growth.
How would you describe the early days of IT in the region?
I started at the end of the 1970s and I’ve been in the development of people in IT for my whole career. My first role was to work with career entry training programmes.
The reason I used to come to Dubai and the rest of the Gulf was because we had a series of partners back then. We opened some of the first career entry programming schools in the Gulf.
The worry will come if strategic projects are abandoned or delayed that really ought to go ahead because of the relative weakness of IT leadership compared with other executive directors. There is the danger of that – I don’t just mean here, I mean everywhere. That is the main worry; that the medium to long term future gets impaired
Even back then, there was quite a strong desire to indigenise the population. We were working with a lot of bright young managers from the Rashid Career Starters, as well people from the police and the military.
Big organisations were definitely into computers but they were very dependant upon foreign skills. What we were trying to do – and we didn’t just do it here, we did it in Malaysia, Singapore and India – was to try and get career entry programmes kicked off properly.
I like to think that the work that we started then was partly responsible for what happened subsequently. It would be interesting for me personally because people who came through our programmes in the 1980s are now in very senior roles in well-known large organisations.
Which countries stood out from the pack?
There was a lot of activity in Kuwait. In terms of my involvement down there, it was definitely Dubai and Kuwait. During the five years I was coming here, the centre of focus of our business moved from Dubai to Abu Dhabi. That was just because that was where there was a lot of interest in the career entry work.
For lots of reasons that are still true today, Dubai was the most popular destination for expats. There was an intention that Dubai would become a hub for training and development, certainly for the lower Gulf.
After being away for the better part of a decade, what sort of changes do you anticipate in the local CIO community?
I’m expecting that there will be a much stronger local representation in the CIO community now. Of the expatriates who are in senior posts, I’m expecting that they will have been here for a long time. What I’m expecting is that there will be more of a commitment to the country. 20-odd years ago, it was a place you might come on a contract for two or three years and then leave.
The whole area was trading on the oil revenues and the tax-free status so that the people would come and they wouldn’t want to stay. I would think that that’s now changed.
What sort of challenges exists for regional CIOs in the current economic climate?
The obvious problem is with the lack of budget. Money is going to become very scarce, investment is going to have to be very carefully evaluated which is good. A lot of the professional effectiveness measures that people will be forced to do are things they should have been doing anyway. To some extent, there might be a boost in terms of professionalism and leadership management.
The worry will come if strategic projects are abandoned or delayed that really ought to go ahead because of the relative weakness of IT leadership compared with other executive directors. There is the danger of that – I don’t just mean here, I mean everywhere. That is the main worry; that the medium to long term future gets impaired.
Will enterprises adopt a short-term slash-and-burn approach?
It’s the typical organisational reaction. One of the big differences from 20 years ago is that the computing area of a large organisation was making so many economies for the business that it was not affected by the recession.
In the 1990s, that all changed. If budgets have to be cut by 20% across the business, well that’s true for IT as well. How do CIOs better sell the value of their division?
What they have to do is first and foremost, put the business first. We have an expression: “You are a businessman first.” If you go into a meeting of senior executives or meet with the financial director with an attitude of attempting to defend your IT investments, you’re probably not going to do very well.
What you have to do is go in there wearing a very strong business executive hat. You need to talk about thinking in the medium term, think about when this ends. Everyone’s just thinking about now – let’s think about 12 months, 24 months, maybe three years later. When this ends, we want to be in good shape; there’s going to be tremendous opportunities then.
You have to go in wearing a very strong business executive hat and talk about thinking in the medium term, think about when this ends. Everyone’s just thinking about now – let’s think about 12 months or three years later. When this ends, we want to be in good shape.
Let’s investigate how we can keep our investment programme in place but maybe fund it differently or bring forward some of the benefits that can enable us to make savings in other parts of the business. I think that’s the line of argument and then it’s up to the rest of the business to defend against it if they don’t want to do it.
If an IT leader just takes the view: “We’re strategic, you shouldn’t cut us,” that’s not going to work. It does require a sophisticated engagement with the rest of the business.
What is the main pitfall that CIOs need to avoid?
They can allow themselves to get a bit siloed. There are issues of maturity even today with organisations not completely understanding what IT is about. For example, if you look at the offshore industry and India for example now, there is still a tendency for executives to go ahead and ask: Why don’t we get rid of this?
Once they have done this, they are then faced with some quite difficult decisions. With further investment in that section, they then throw their hands up and say: “I thought we got rid of all this.” They’re just reluctant to engage and understand how IT has to operate.
It’s incumbent upon IT leaders to take that battle on and insist that they understand. That’s tough and especially so for people if they are a little bit anxious that they themselves do not completely understand the business.
There is inevitably a change in the technical areas so a lot of the traditional focus on skills like programming and analysis – the sort of thing you were encouraging 22 years – is now mostly offshore.
In the West, certainly Britain and North America, the skillset for an IT professional has got to change. It’s got to be more about management leadership, influence, engagement. It’s about leveraging other people’s capabilities to get things done with other resources that you don’t own.
It’s a quite a big call, actually for people who came into the business where they perhaps wanted a job that they could focus and get it done and not worry too much about people – so maybe engaging with people wasn’t their first choice.
Is it possible for IT professionals to retrench into new roles?
It requires quite a big personal growth commitment. Plenty of people can do it with the right kind of coaching and support. Some people can’t – and that’s sad because they are going to be left behind. It’s this group in the middle who could if they believed they had to – that’s the group we have to get to.
Follow us on
