One perception is that the boardroom has an obligation to share the role of IT leadership with the CIO - IT being too important to ‘abdicate’ to the IT department. So whether boardrooms like it or not they have to embrace IT. An alternative less hard-nosed perspective is that the need for the boardroom to engage in IT represents an opportunity for CIOs to enhance their value by providing the services of adviser, in order to make their senior executive colleagues more confident in respect of strategically important IT matters.

Compliance has been haunting IT Directors since those idiots at Enron decided to go for broke. But hey here’s the thing. It has turned out to be very positive for companies and businesses everywhere, and although it has been a difficult road, IT Directors finally have the clout to put their companies’ technology in order.

Business Intelligence is all about asking the right questions. The last few years have seen a massive effort by most organisations to try to organise their information through enterprise software, but unless they can drive the data they have collected to give them meaningful and useful reports it is pretty much wasted effort. Where customers are spending their money, and on what is useful information that can make the difference to the success and failure of a business.

Increasing demands from the business, changes to the way in which systems are developed, and the beginnings of a shortage of staff with the right skills all mean there has been no better time for an IT Director to demonstrate really good leadership.

Enterprise software is complicated, expensive stuff, with long lead times and it quite often needs the help of a partner or massive consultancy to get it right. For every pound spent on some licences, around five pounds will be spent on consultancy – this stuff is tricky.

The pace of technology change is so fast that sometimes it is hard to stand still and take stock of what is really happening. This is especially true in the communications worlds, where IP convergence is having a fundamental effect on the working practices of organisations all over the world. For IT Professionals it is a time to take stock, find out as much as possible about how these changes might affect them, and start to change some of their basic approaches to providing technology to their organisations.

The IT recruitment market is at its most buoyant since the dotcom boom, and in one recent survey the proportion of IT professionals looking to change jobs in the next six months was well over 50 per cent. Finding and keeping enough skilled IT staff over the next 12 months is going to get ugly.

Harvey Nash has run this survey for the last eight years and it has grown in stature each year to become a definitive study of emerging trends for the CIO community.

Why Attend?

This complimentary seminar is a must attend event for IT Executives, CIO’s and Board Level Directors with involvement in the IT Function, who want to find out more about the changing role of the CIO.

Delegates will be given the opportunity to meet the other key IT decision makers and will share ideas on the issues that matter most to the IT community.