TORONTO – The Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) celebrated its 50th anniversary at a conference in Toronto Tuesday that involved a debate on the evolution of the IT industry and the state of the profession as a whole.
Richard Wilson, executive vice-president of Toronto-based risk and compliance software firm Resolver Inc., said that while IT is often asked to develop the technical requirements for many different business projects, he argued they need to start managing the business requirements as well.
“Take a look at the downfall of any major corporation in the last six months,” he told conference attendees. “Whether it’s security, privacy, governance, or risk issues, everything is strongly impacted and managed by IT.”
Wilson cited the recent actions of a rogue Société Générale trader Jérôme Kerviel – who was blamed for over $7 billion of losses at the major French bank – could have been prevented had IT and the rest of the business worked more closely.
“It was later discovered that the bank had 75 independent warnings notifying them that the trading he was putting through was inappropriate,” he said. “They choose to override those internal controls and ignore the warnings.”
Steve Driz, director of IT at student travel agency Travel CUTS Ltd, agreed, saying that IT has been labeled as a cost centre rather than a business driver.
“Areas like IT security and IT governance are seen as a secondary priority – kind of like a black hole in many companies,” he said. “IT and the business don’t speak the same language. The two must merge and IT and the rest of the business need to bridge that gap.”
Calvin (Kelly) Gotlieb, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and Order of Canada award recipient, said that IT is beginning to play a role in the decision making process for most enterprises – which is a necessary component for IT to truly be considered a profession.
“This is all the more reason that we want to be sure there’s an effective system of accreditation like CIPS has,” Gotlieb, who also served as one of CIPS’ earliest presidents, said. “CIPS, while over 50 years old is not getting the credit it deserves.”
And with computer sciences and IT playing a role in vastly different areas such as environmental science, computational biology, security, privacy, social networks, and animation, Gotlieb said the role CIPS plays in laying out the professional and ethical code of conduct for IT workers is even more crucial than ever before.
For Wilson, however, a closer link to the rest of the business will lead to many ethical dilemmas that IT professionals will have to face alone. Wilson said that the Enron and WorldCom scandals, and the subsequent creation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the U.S., have forced major enterprises to ensure their financial reports are error-free. Translating this to IT, he added, will lead to many companies looking to manipulate their IT systems.
“The data they receive will seem to be accurate, but it is in fact manipulated via IT – rather than in the actual financial report,” he said. There needs to be a strong debate, he said, regarding who owns the IT systems, who will be accountable for faulty data, and the potential for management to take advantage of IT organizations and professionals to manipulate key data.
“I’d argue the next Sarbans-Oxley needs to be focused on IT systems,” he said.
