The problem with being a market analyst is that nobody will ever thank you for being overly pessimistic. So when a market analyst drops massive hints about a downturn well before the event, perhaps he's worth listening to.
Gartner Group research fellow Mark Raskino forecast the recession in his research notes for some time before it happened. More recently, he and fellow Gartner analyst Kurt Potter briefed 50 CIOs in February on the theme of ‘Economic Downturn - Implications & Strategic Decisions for IT' at its UK HQ in Egham, Surrey.
So what does Raskino say about the current predicament? Nobody can safely say when the downturn will stop, he admits, but we can safely predict that CIOs had better moderate their behaviour this recession.
At the Egham event, Raskino issued a dire warning about the extreme circumstances facing executives in the current economic climate. In short, his advice could be paraphrased as ‘stop posturing and start slashing'.
If Raskino's hard-hitting conclusion shocked any of the CIOs in the audience, none of them took him up on the criticism in an open session later. In what seemed like an attempt to be cruel to be kind, Raskino told the assembled IT chiefs that they had to stop making four common mistakes, which could become disastrous as tensions mount during the downturn.
"Stop hunting cool projects and get back to basics," was one stark piece of advice. Later, when CIO spoke to delegates, it was impossible to find a single one admitting to making ‘vanity projects' a priority when he'd planned his strategy for 2009.
"I work in the public sector, so none of that would really apply to me," said David Tidey, assistant chief executive for business change at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. "Still, it was reassuring to see that some of my own conclusions were shared by him."
Honesty the best policy
Enforcing the message that the era of greed was over, Raskino told the audience to "stop asking for new tools for now if what you have will do". More controversially, he advised that CIOs should stop "trumpeting faux results", namely the practice of taking credit for business-as-usual uptime. This will irritate, he warned.
The fourth biggest source of resentment caused by CIOs is "internal turf wars", said Raskino. Office politics is not a good idea in the current climate that is friendly to mergers and acquisitions, he explained.
Business survival issues to focus on will be cost restructuring while defending the business's revenues and cash.
Another problem, he argued, is that the pillars of received wisdom are crumbling. Ideas that property is a safe bet, that the booming Chinese and Indian markets will create demand that will fuel our economies, and that Europe won't catch the US cold have already been proven erroneous.
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