THE ABILITY of IT to respond to a change in a company’s direction or a downturn in the economy could have serious implications for Irish businesses, according to a report from consultancy company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

The report said organisations needed to respond to the current economic crisis by developing new business models with technology at their centre. The report criticised companies for not being flexible enough to react quickly to the worsening conditions.

It also called for firms to put the chief information officer (CIO) at heart of an organisation’s decision-making process.

According to Ciaran Kelly of PwC: “Businesses are downsizing and the ability of IT to respond to that is very limited – in the same respect as when businesses were growing rapidly it was relatively easy to respond to increased IT needs and generate new projects. But reversing that in a downturn is very difficult for most companies.”

The report says one area where some organisations have fallen down has been in the process of empire building.

“Many of the firms acquired by other organisations did not have similar technologies and we now have corporations with a patchwork quilt of different techs,” said Kelly.

One company praised in the report is Intel. Martin Curley, senior principal engineer and global director of IT innovation and research for Intel said the processor business model is one of those ideas that appears once in a generation, and trying to replicate it is difficult. “We do have one operating model as a company, and that is enormously successful. We can even make bad ideas work, and we have. Now Intel’s challenge is to grow.”

He said from an IT and business standpoint agility is very important. “In IT, I think the focus is moving from patching different solutions on an ongoing basis to providing a platform for business agility.”