If you've been in the IT industry long enough, the name Mike Jarvis will be familiar. In the late 1990s, he was appointed a senior GM at FNB and became a high-profile figure during the bank's transformation. Jarvis ended up staying at FNB until 2000, when he went back to the UK.
"I've been in IT all my life," he says. "Although I'm an economist and accountant, I started out in heavy engineering, working for a company that made heavy excavators and cranes. I came to South Africa in 1985 and Chris Ball recruited me for FNB. I stayed until 2000."
Jarvis met Judge Mervyn King in 1988, when he became a member of the board of FNB. Their friendship was to profoundly influence what he's doing now.
"He came into my office and asked me to teach him as much about IT as I knew. So over the next 12 weeks, he visited me regularly and, to his credit, stuck to it. We've kept in touch over the years. I was over here in August last year and he must have found out somehow because we had lunch. He confided that he was a bit worried about the implementation of IT principles in organisations because he hadn't seen any take-up by the big organisations. I wasn't surprised by that because I had been working in the UK and had come to the conclusion that most executives can't govern - not that they don't want to - but they can't because they don't understand IT."
Jarvis says there are a few main reasons why IT isn't governed properly, if at all.
"Board members don't understand it; they don't know how to get value out of it, and it changes too much to keep up and they can't govern it. I've not found one director who doesn't want to govern it. And most of the CIOs I know can't talk business language."
Stakeholder value
King suggested he return to SA and set up a company.
"So now I'm working for a start-up," laughs Jarvis, "and being in a classic start-up means you do lots of everything. Most important to me is to get the value proposition articulated, so most of my day is spent with customers: telling them what governance is all about - that it's just a means to an end and how to get value out of IT. We're not going to turn you into IT experts, just give you the right questions to ask them. Then, of course, there are the products themselves and how we understand how they work."
He notes that he's not a great admin person.
"I sometimes look at myself in the mirror and tell myself I'm out of character. I've sorted out the legal side, getting the finances in place, PAYE and so on, and I've done it because you have to do it. I have a great partner in former Symantec SA chairman Patrick Evans. He and I met in August last year when he was still deciding what he wanted to do. Culturally, we work well together. And Ken Jarvis is our chairman. The key is that we're not looking to build an enormous empire but rather to get some high-powered people who can stand in front of a board and hold their own. But my daily life is predominantly about getting the message out. We're not auditors, and we're not ticking boxes or installing governance techniques for the sake of them. I see people trying to comply with the King principles, but you can't comply with a principle. You can comply with the law, but not a principle. That's why I've rather used the word 'apply'. It means taking the guidelines, principles and practices and applying them to your company, or explaining why you're not. But that means grey matter. Ticking boxes is something with which auditors are familiar."
We're not auditors, and we're not ticking boxes or installing governance techniques for the sake of them.
Jarvis' consultancy aims to turn governance into something that provides stakeholder value to organisations.
"Our proposals were examined by a number of CEOs and within the first two weeks, I got feedback: they liked the principles, they liked the approach to governance, but they asked who was going to implement it. I said it was up to them, but they didn't like that. So, to cut a long story short, we now have two companies: Oversight Solutions, which is the advisory company, and Oversight Services, which is at the implementation level to help CIOs and IT managers on the ground."
He says one day he'll be brave enough to walk into a customer and not charge them upfront but just take a cut on the savings.
"The really brave bit of that will be to get the baseline right, though. But it's fun at the moment. I haven't got out of bed with so much anticipation for a long, long time."
First published in the November 2012 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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