The business of IT

Technology does matter, but it will be dictated by a company's business values.

BY SUSAN TSANG

Public-listed Singapore engineering company, ST Engineering, believes that IT on its own is no longer a value proposition. Technology, the company says, will become mainstream where its strength in the future is in its ability to accelerate the business.

CNETAsiaWeek: What are your company's current top 3 IT priorities?

Teo Chin Seng: In order of importance: Business alignment, IT value proposition to the organization, and keeping IT infrastructure in tandem with business development.

IT is no longer the main catalyst of business change. Today, it has become very utility-based where its strength is its ability to accelerate business. Enabling business is a given. Now, it's about how technology can create accelerations to the business process in cost, quality and delivery.

It's like electricity--it's not a competitive transformation for a company, but it is required because the company can't run without it. Same with IT--it's mainstream now.

What are the top 3 technology trends you believe will most affect your IT environment in the next 18 to 24 months?
The technology business is going to change. It will not be a technology trend per se but an industry trend in terms of technology. A technology trend is about SAN (storage area network) coming up, for example.

But the industry is not moving that way now. The business trend of the industry will dictate what's going to happen.

One of the trends is: the soft-hard total solution not in terms of integration, but in terms of delivering end-value proposition, is going to be an amalgamation of all the factors we know today from systems integration to network to hardware and software, encompassing all the key stakeholders and players of the IT ecosystem.

More and more, especially in outsourcing, people want to get away from the problem of looking at all this in isolation. They want to see it as a complete picture.

We are going to see the convergence of technology coming into mainstream enterprise. Less and less you'll see the demarcation between professional and consumer in mobility communication, and this will come into a common form. In which form, I guess it is still finding its way.

Another trend is that technology is moving away from being very much focused on things like a PC or printer supplier. Dell Computer, for example, is moving beyond the PC into other peripherals, including printers and MP3 devices.

What we will see by and by, is that vertical solutions will have traits and identities that are not as narrow as they are today.

We will still see a printer that supports wireless, a projector that is network-enabled, and a PC that doubles up as a home entertainment device. It is more from a product development point of view, how the products come to us. This will affect ST Engineering, and will be some of the interesting options that future workers will face--do you want to carry a laptop or an email device?

Spend a dollar on a high-tech data streaming device or do you want to use a consumer-tech device to stream a smaller data size? These are things that will affect our buying decisions. The proliferation of the personal devices will move toward the organization and take a single route.

What areas of technology do you plan to implement or upgrade in the next 12 months?
How do we collapse and improve the customer chain? We will want to extend the ERP (enterprise resource application) and integrate it with SCM (supply chain management) and CRM (customer relationship management) in the backend. But this is all only purely technology.

What we want is to treat customers as customers. Technology that brings the customer closer to the company will be things we will be investing in because that gives immediate benefits in terms of revenue, and in terms of a different product offering.

We'll also be looking at optimization of what we have here, but it's what I call a subliminal activity.

IT has to be efficient and subliminal, meaning that it is a given. We have to take it not as a project, but as an ongoing activity to bring down the cost. It has to be second nature.

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