"But if were doing that in the way that we talk about IT we'd be talking about very, very technical details of things like how the transmission operates, how the suspension is designed, and so on. Things that are not really relevant at all to the person who is wanting to know whether the car is going to suit their needs."

Marks says that a culture originally developed where, due to high cost in the early days, you talked about the very technical elements of the technology. In the last twenty years, information technology has come out of the laboratory, onto the street, onto the desktop, and the discussion that we need to have about it today is vastly different."

"It's not a question of which technology is better, which processor chip is faster, how much memory you have."

"It's a question of what can I do with this thing to effectively run my business, and how do I make sure that when I invest in technology I actually get a return on that investment."

I asked about the ever-decreasing cost of technology. "Not too many years ago," responded Mark Toomey, "you used to talk of the rule of thumb that said that any investment in information technology was fifty percent the technology and fifty percent the change effort."

"I think —  and this is purely anecdotal —  that that figure has moved to somewhere around 20/80, or maybe 25/75 now, but only a minor portion of the cost of a new business capability is in the IT components and that a much greater portion of the cost in in developing the organizational capability to use the new technology component."

"It astounds me," he continued, "that, even though that reality is becoming more and more obvious, we see organizations still running IT projects rather than business change projects where they have estimated the cost as being just the IT component. And then they're surprised when it comes in late and over budget because they hadn't planned for all the other activities."

We covered many other aspects of governance  in our discussion. The theme that kept coming through, whether for very large-scale multi-organization projects or for single organizations and even down to the smallest of organizations, is as Mark Toomey put it: "It's still vitally important to recognize that when you're using information technology to drive some change, what you are doing is actually changing the way that your business operates."

"You're changing jobs that people do, you're changing the way that your customers and your suppliers interact with your company, and all of those factors combine with the fact that you're building some new technology or you've bought some new technology and you're implementing it to make the project that you're undertaking somewhat more significant than merely installing a piece of software."

Mark makes the point that the ease of buying a computer game and installing it on your home computer has somehow given some people the idea that you can do the same with a piece of business software: you buy it, hand it over to your  IT people, they install it, and everybody can just start using it.

"That cargo cult mentality of course completely forgets about the fact that the majority of the people who work in an organization (a) they're busy, and (b) they're pretty averse to change. And organizations that have done things like that have found out to their regret that generally their new software doesn't get used, and that things don't change."

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