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Dr Yoseph Araya is a plant ecologist and associate lecturer at the Open University. He works on the biology and conservation of South African fynbos vegetation. Environmental education and the role of the public in research is one of his key interests.

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The Bottom Line

Evan Davis gets to the heart of the big finance stories at The Bottom Line.

Jacqueline de Rojas, McAfee’s UK and Ireland vice president, said on this week’s The Bottom Line that the IT customer needs to know what they want - and that their wants are, in many cases, “woolly and aspirational”.

Woolly and aspirational wants lead to over-ambitious and poorly defined systems that take longer to design and implement, and they go over budget.

Can woolly computer users get the systems they need? [Image: CaliforniaAmy under CC-BY-NC-SA licence]

But it’s not just the customer who’s aspirational. In one public sector IT project, optimistic and enthusiastic IT staff thought, “Yes, an online payment - that’s what they really need, surely.”

But when they engaged in discussion, they discovered that the client was less enthusiastic about the IT department’s suggestion, and didn’t expect much take up or benefit. But what the client thought would really be of benefit was a telephone payment service.

The system, consequentially implemented, brought in a significantly larger sum of money to the public organisation.

This behaviour has led to better performance on both sides and there are two points here.

One is that the two parties talked with each other. The IT people knew what was technically feasible and the business people knew what they wanted.

The second point is that the clients knew what they wanted most – they were able to prioritise their wants.

However, prioritisation often has an additional complication in the public sector because politicians, too, are aspirational.

Too often new political events crop up before IT developers have had the time to develop and implement complex systems demanded by earlier requirments - so clients never realise anticipated benefits.

The scale and complexity of government IT systems damages IT suppliers as well as the public sector. The Financial Times reported that ISoft and BT’s Global Services Division suffered financial losses on the £12.76bn National Programme for IT, the programme to link the NHS IT systems.

Put together aspirational suppliers, aspirational clients and aspirational politicians and you have a recipe for disaster.

So how do you get round these aspirations to achieve affordable IT systems that do what is required of them on time, in budget?

One way is to provide a context in which those key parties willingly come together, where they have opportunities to discuss the project, and to contribute their skills.

But having created the context, you then must ask ‘are these the right people coming together’?

Find the right people with the right skills.

But you need more than business or technical skills. You need people who are willing to share their skills, and can share what they know.

This means they have to be able to communicate and connect in a wide range of contexts, both formal and informal, as well as being open and honest, and taking the time to build up trust.

As trust builds, people recognise their communalities, and become more willingly to adapt and share risk.

This engagement with each other allows people to unravel that wooliness, to prioritise their wants and helps people reach closer to their aspirations.

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