By ADAM GIFFORD
IBM's new managing director for Australia and New Zealand, David Thodey, believes the "No 8 wire" attitude might have had something to do with the failure of the Incis police computer project.
"In a global market it is absolutely essential you are able to leverage the competence from round the world," he said.
"I would say in retrospect we possibly allowed the team to get too isolated in New Zealand."
He believed the company could have done a lot of things better in terms of leveraging "that worldwide capability."
In the battle to get the work done, staff may have kept their heads down and never thought to look up and ask for help.
"As a New Zealander I think we all have a little bit of that in us. We're going to make stuff work and we can do it.
"So hey, we wish it had never happened but now we are moving forward."
Mr Thodey said he was starting afresh. Incis is out of the books financially, and he is happy with the company's first-quarter results, to be announced later this month.
Part of being able to move forward was to bring the company to an appropriate size.
From just over 1000 people, IBM now has about 720 full-time employees here.
Much of its current focus is e-business - a term IBM invented back in 1996 but which never achieved all its potential because the company did not have the required elements in place.
"We have delivered strongly on the services side and business transformation, but we took our eye off the ball on the Web server side."
That has been addressed with the acquisition of Sequent, with its NUMA Q series of Intel-based high-end Unix servers.
"The acquisition of Sequent was timely, especially for New Zealand because it was stronger here than in many other countries round the world. It has also given us 35 people dedicated to that market."
He said the Sequent machines filled a gap between the Intel-based Netfinity PC server line and high-end machines such as the RS/6000 and S/80, built around IBM's Power PC chip.
"IBM did 50 acquisitions last year, including a lot of small ones. If we think a market has moved and someone is good out there we will acquire."
It was also investing heavily in partnerships and alliances with leading companies such as i2 and Ariba, Siebel, SAP and PeopleSoft.
"Always in the past IBM would toy around with building applications. We have made a very conscious decision to partner.
"Our core competence is around services implementation. We're good at outsourcing, and good at industry-led practices around a core product."
New Zealand's woes have not been reflected in Australia, where there were a further 12,000 people on IBM's payroll.
"Australasian revenue grew last year by 21 per cent to $A4.1 billion [$4.9 billion], so we are a significant Australasian player.
"What we are doing in New Zealand is building up a very strong New Zealand team that leverages Australasian competence."
Mr Thodey started at IBM in Wellington in 1981, working for 10 years in the banking area before moving to Australia for a job in the small-business and consumer group as it was introducing the home PC.
After four years in Tokyo, he returned to run one of the Australian divisions, followed by a term heading operations and marketing.
Despite IBM's role in making government agencies here gun-shy about complex technology projects, Mr Thodey believed New Zealand must pick up the pace for adoption of technology at government level.
"It needs leadership. That can be simple things like every department saying everything is going online. That will pull the market through.
"It also needs to do something with education because we have a skill shortage.
"It's not just the technology things - this is touching every aspect of our lives and people need to be comfortable with it."
Incis team 'too isolated'
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