Sean Elwick, St Vincent's Health group IT Director of Transformation, is a man who, by his own admission, is passionate about realising business value from “modern IT”.
As he wrote recently on LinkedIn, Elwick – a keynote speaker at the CIO Summit being staged in Melbourne on Tuesday 23 March - “as business and technology continue to increasingly mash together terms such as ‘big data’, ‘IoT’, ‘AI’, and ‘actionable analytics’ are creating an environment of excitement and numerous digital transformations”.
“The word transformation can be over used and is definitely an old subject. Businesses have been engaged in transformation for a long time. Indeed when I started in IT the buzz was transformation through moving from mainframes to client server technology and then the promise of e-commerce. We are all seasoned solders of transformation and many can tell the war stories and show the scars,” Elwick wrote.
Elwick went on to talk about failure rates in ERP projects,
{loadposition peter}“In 2000 Langenwalter reported ERP project failure rates at 60% or higher. What is interesting and no doubt disappointing is that today McKinsey’s reports the failure rate of large-scale change programs has hovered around 70% over many years,” Elwick said.
“For all those war stories and scars we still appear to be making the same mistakes when it comes to digital transformation. In today’s increasingly connected world these transformational failures are not just about IT failure, they are failures from the Board down,” he stressed.
Elwick asks the question, “despite increased maturity are we still repeating the same mistakes from 20 years ago? Are we driving business change with an over focus on technology and being blinded by the latest ‘bright shiny toy’ that is being pitched?”
As Media Corp International says about Elwick on the CIO Summit website, “Sean is a strategic, collaborative, results orientated business executive who has successfully orchestrated and delivered lasting change to Australian and international organisations”.
“Transformations that Sean has led have contained both a strong information technology component and a practical operational interpretation that have enabled all aspects of business to achieve success.”
MCI Australia CEO Tyron McGurgan says the Summit creates “a unique interactive forum” for all participants, including interaction and engagement in the informal networking and meeting sessions”.
“We invite only the leading international and local experts to provide sessions on site, this allows for attendees to be taught by front-line executives that compress years of meaningful experience into a systematic, well organised learning program,” McGurgan says.
To register for this year’s 7th annual CIO Leaders Australia Summit to be held at Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium go to the Summit website.