Earlier this week I sat on a breakfast panel with Tony Waters, Tony Hayes and John Thorp (via video link from Canada) to provide industry insights into the state of IT portfolio management across Australia and New Zealand. Technically speaking I was there to provide the IT subset of the recurrent debates of enterprise innovation through IT, and running IT like a business.  

The event was hosted by Fujitsu and ISACA (as joint advocates of the COBIT-ValIT Framework)and drew a who's who from the Queensland Government ICT executive ranks with the beefy promise of Enterprise Transformation through Investment Management.

Photograph Left to Right: Tony Waters, Deputy Director-General Queensland Department of Public Works; Glen McMurtrie, ISACA Brisbane Chapter President; myself;  Tony Hayes, Executive Director Service Delivery and Performance Commission, Queensland Department of Premier and Cabinet and Chairman of IT Governance Institute; David Sparksman, Fujitsu Queensland State Manager; and Bernard Thorpe, Director Shape Consulting.

In the high profile environment of technology consolidation, looking around the room it was clear that investment management is high on the list of the Queensland Government. Also spotted were Acting QGCIO Alan Chapman, ICT Industry Working Group Chair Dr Paul Campbell, and Technology Transformation Project Director Sharon Valuch. Director General Public Works Mal Grierson also delivered the opening address.

Aside from the audience though, from a panelist and analysts' perspective the striking factor of the morning was that the discussion rarely drifted to technology. As an example, it is the first event I have been to or participated in in over 12-months where questions pertaining to "Green ICT" were never asked.

But even more interestingly, it was the first event that I can remember in 10-years where the panel were not specifically asked about technology supply. That is, in 50-minutes we were never asked to field questions relating to who are the strong PPM technology vendors, and what are the technologies being deployeed to address the transformation, innovation and investment management within large enterprises. That was left to the marketing brochures on the registration desk.

The event has prompted me to ask whether the industry may infact be reaching an inflection point of business-IT alignment at the precise time when some significant belt tightening is on the way. The alternate view would be that the finance directors have finally found a way to pro-activley strip funding from the technology operation. Either way the adoption of investment and asset management practices in IT organisations is being driven to an operational necessity. 

It may be the realistion of portfolio and asset management skills coupled with process and method unification and improvements (across PMBOK, PMI Cert, ITIL, COBIT, Prince2 etc) that is uniting management language, culture, and measurment across the modern enterprise. We'll be giving considerations to what the barometers for this tidal change will be.