Published on the 12/05/2015 | Written by Beverley Head

Former Woolworths boss and Fairfax chairman, Roger Corbett, has confirmed the gulf that can exist between IT and the C-suite…

CIOs often lament the lack of understanding of, and interest in, IT issues. Speaking last week at the SAS Forum in Sydney, Roger Corbett provided a glimpse of the gulf which can exist in even the largest and most technology-reliant enterprises.

Corbett acknowledged that despite being warned it was coming, the issue of digital disruption did not resonate for him until it flowed all the way to Fairfax’s bottom line. He said there was a difference between “knowing something and realising it”.

“In Fairfax we knew there would be digital revolution in the newspaper business, we talked about it, we had policies and strategies – then, in January 2011, the sales dropped as always – but in February they didn’t go up; we thought it would be March.

“They didn’t come in March and the penny dropped – (when) revenue’s dropping 15 percent compound you move very quickly from knowing to realisation.”

Similarly, when he was Woolworths’ CEO Corbett also had little appreciation of the skills issues facing the tech community. He said that the retailer had been working on a major technology project and the IT department wanted to get programming performed overseas, due to a lack of local talent.

“I said ‘that’s a terrible idea, not a good idea, come back when you have got a better idea’,” he said.

Eventually the IT team responded that sending programming work offshore was the best idea available, that there was no local alternative. “That was a revolution – when I understood the capacity that existed in India,” said Corbett.

“There is no reason Australia couldn’t have been in that position – only if we had the leadership.”

Again that demonstrates the gulf in understanding between the boardroom and the reality that technology leaders often face. Leadership alone would not have delivered the sheer scale of the tech-savvy portion of the Indian population, or the lower pay rates that allowed offshore programming to flourish as a result of labour arbitrage.

Scott Farquhar, co-founder and CEO of Sydney-based software house Atlassian, also a panelist at the SAS event last week warned that the skills problem persisted, and that enrolments in technology courses in Australia had halved in the ten years since he left university.

Atlassian, he said, had opened a development centre in Vietnam, “because they teach computer science from kindy to Year 12. Every person who graduates from high school will have skills we want to employ.”

“In ten years’ time is Australia going to have the workforce we need for the future? How do we do it early enough?”

The problems that Corbett and his tech team faced a decade ago at Woolworths in finding local tech talent are still acute, according to Farquhar, who said that a significant portion of Atlassian’s local staff were working on 457 visas, and had been brought in from overseas to plug the continuing skills gap.