Technology & the digital age 

Interview with Bryan Cruickshand, Head of IT Advisory, KPMG UK LLP

"A CEO or CFO today has a number of concerns with regard to technology. There is just so much information coming at them on new technologies, which, at least in the face of it, should provide huge business advantage and help them to be more competitive and get ahead of the competition. The reality is that for every 10 items that they hear maybe only one has business relevance to them. So, how do they navigate through this sea of information in order to focus on the technologies that really can help enable improvements in their business?

I think the second major area where both the CEO and CFO in particular have concerns in technology is that such a large percentage of their spend now relates to technology - just keeping the systems going. Any major change has a large spend on technology associated with it. They need to consider how to get best value out of that spend, how to reduce it where at all possible, and how to make sure that when you do spend that it delivers the right value.

Many organisations have already gone through their fundamental computerising of their environments - large scale integrated end to end computer environments to deal with all the transaction processing in organisations has essentially been done. Where organisations are now getting to is understanding that the investments that they put into getting these large systems in place haven’t really delivered the value that they were expecting and therefore the emphasis now is on reengineering these environments in order to deliver best value. Technology is already there as an asset, but an under used asset. Having a focus on how to reengineer technology environments in order to optimise the benefits to the business has got to be a huge focus for most organisations.

Secondly, because all organisations now have technology right at the heart, pumping information through them, how to recognise the information that will best benefit a business and move it forward and therefore engineer the right information systems to provide information to the right people at the right time would be the second area I think of real emphasis

And the third area is keeping an eye on when new concepts become commercially viable. So certainly keeping an eye on where the commoditisation within the cloud computing concept becomes viable, and how to take advantage of this to reduce costs and to improve reaction time into the market. Because technology is so integrated into the way a business works it’s no longer the technologist pushing technology solutions. You need business people with a technology understanding, helping business to understand how to leverage technology. Because we blend these skills I think that we can bring a breadth of view to our clients that really supports that they are making the right decisions."