A little over five years ago, the very first edition of IT Week carried a report on events at the 1998 IT Directors Forum at Cranfield University (not to be confused with the floating IT Directors' Forum held each year on a cruise ship - sometimes an apostrophe makes a boatload of difference).
"Despite the rhetoric about IT driving businesses, IT managers are still battling for recognition at board level," we wrote in our 1998 article.
Cranfield's Keith Patching was also quoted: "IT managers have been fighting for 15 years to get IT taken seriously in the organisation, but it just isn't happening."
Well if Patching's carbon-dating was correct, we can now make that 20 years. As we highlight elsewhere in this issue, IT Week's own research into this area - kindly paid for by Unisys - shows that entrenched positions change only slowly, and in fact resolutely failed to budge in the past 12 months. A year ago 45 percent of firms had an IT director on the board and this year the proportion is 44 percent.
Where there was significant change - in the public sector - the news looks even less cheerful.
IT projects in the public sector have become like a chalice not only laced with poison but also dosed with radiation, set ablaze and garnished with the corpse of a dead rat. So it is no surprise to see a lack of improvement in IT's representation at the highest decision-making levels in public sector organisations. Instead we found evidence of financial managers dumping the unwelcome IT vessel in someone else's lap. And often that somebody appears to be nobody, given that the number of public sector bodies claiming an absence of IT representation at the top showed the largest gain of all categories in our survey.
If change for the better is to come, it has to come from within IT departments.
Boards that don't understand the pivotal role that IT can play in business, 25 years after the invention of the spreadsheet, are not about to notice a light-bulb hovering over their heads. It is up to IT managers to educate board members, and to learn the language that other business leaders use and the values that they set store by.
You don't have to actually start thinking with the illogical, right-hand side of your brain - you just have to work harder to understand those that do. The rewards can be significant. Business leaders at organisations that do have an IT director sitting on the board express significantly higher levels of satisfaction with the contribution that the IT department makes to the business as a whole. That has to be good news for the business, the IT department, and the career prospects of the IT manager.
Improving matters will require that IT leaders take an unpleasantly long look in the mirror. As Brian Hadfield, managing director of Unisys, says, IT managers have to "get rid of the chip on their shoulder".
In our story five years ago, Cranfield's research had revealed that many commercial managers saw IT staff as inflexible, defensive and politically naive. "Think how you react to an estate agent," Patching said, charmingly.
There is little reason to suppose that such opinions have altered much in the intervening five years. It is up to us to ensure that they don't endure forever.
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