In a 1984 made-for-TV movie, Oscar winner Lou Gossett plays the overzealous head of security at a New York City condominium. He's obsessed with creating a perfectly safe environment for all his condo residents. He patrols the building constantly. He imposes a curfew on residents. He berates them when they're careless locking up. The guy is sincere and conscientious. Determined to ensure his tenants' safety, he goes as far as to stage a terrifying attack on one of them, rescuing him at the last minute to drive home the importance of security-consciousness, and not incidentally, his indispensability. At movie's end, Mr. Security Man has all his condo residents - his employers - firmly under his thumb.

It's a libertarian parable, warning that a society that grows so terrified of outside threats could end up abdicating its basic rights to its professional protectors, thus turning a country into a police state. But here at Balmori Software, this clunky B-movie also puts us in mind of a similarly unhealthy kind of relationship that can sometimes develop between a company's IT department and its traditional departments, like sales, purchasing, warehousing, or accounting.

When a company computerizes its accounting, inventory control, or A/R and billing, there is an unfortunate tendency for the non-technologists in the organization not only to defer, but sometimes actually to abdicate, to the technologists. We've seen finance and accounting people inexplicably asking IT to pass judgment on accounting policy issues.

In one recent case, accountants at a company asked their IT group, "Do we have to input sales transactions explicitly, and then after that input collections separately, in cases of cash sales?" Let's see... The accountants ask the IT people a question about ... accounting policy? That's like Manny Pacquiao asking us if we think he should put more hip rotation into his uppercut. How do we know about this incident? Because the IT department in turn passed the problem on to us, as the vendor of the application into which all this data-inputting was going on.

We don't tell this little anecdote to poke fun at anyone. We tell it because it's a real problem in many organizations, and deserves to be addressed. Fuzziness about areas of responsibility between operating departments and IT people is a common reality in many businesses. And that's not good for anybody. Not for the IT guys being asked to address problems in areas outside their expertise, not for the line and accounting people who are loosening their grip on their functional areas out of technophobia, and certainly not for day-to-day effectiveness of the business whose employees are, with the best intentions, misdirecting their energies and time.

If this is happening all across Philippine commerce and industry - and the experience of our help desk shows that it's very prevalent - then it's a serious drain on the productivity of a large part of the economy.

The problem, let's face it, is that too many business people are still too intimidated by computers and information technology to deal with it calmly. As late as today, the middle of 2014, many Philippine SMEs are still just dipping their toes into computerization of their business processes, so of course the topic is still terra incognita for them.

In the almost comical case described above, it wasn't that the accountants didn't know their accounting; it was simply that they had no self-confidence about IT matters; and when confronted with what was in fact a basic accounting issue, they lacked the assurance to peel away the accounting aspect from the IT aspect; and so they abdicated to the IT guys just because the issue arose within the context of a computerized accounting system. But the original question being a matter of accounting principle, not computers, of course the IT guys didn't know what to do with the question either.


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