There’s an old adage claiming that “Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good—luckily, this is not difficult”. Despite obviously having been written by a member of the fairer sex, this has an echo of truth to it even today, nearly 120 years after the birth of the women’s liberation movement. Judging by our fascinating cover story for this edition, Asian women are indeed giving their male IT management colleagues a hard run for their money. Anyone who has seen the spectacular performances of female athletes at the Beijing Olympics would have little doubt about the abilities of the wonderful women of the world. An analyst from Accenture once told me that up to 40 per cent of senior IT decision makers in the seemingly patriarchal Asia Pacific region are female, and I’m more inclined to believe him now I’ve read this thought-provoking piece. I’m betting you will be as surprised as I was, by some of the research findings outlined inside (Page 24).
In this issue (Page 30) we also examine some of the pitfalls and problems with correctly calculating return on investment (ROI) for IT projects. We canvass a range of prominent research house analysts for their views and advice on this essential business question, which turns out to be much more complicated than it looks.
As you might already have seen, CIO Asia and its sister Fairfax Business Media publications on enterprise IT, now has a brand new web portal—www.mis-asia.com—complete with bells and whistles such as podcasts, videos, RSS feeds, blogs and breaking news. This gives our CIO Asia readers even more opportunity to provide feedback on the magazine. So, don’t hold back. Speak out and be heard. I look forward to hearing from you.
Ross O. Storey
