IT — the “hidden” side of a company

As Japan continues to open its gates and an ever-increasing amount of capital flows into the country as the result of international M&A events, the need for qualified evaluations of all aspects of potential Japanese assets is continually increasing.

A close examination of the attitudes towards a company’s IT policies and standards and their everyday execution often provides a more revealing glimpse of the target’s “corporate DNA” than marketing material or accounting statements.

Although certified accountants to analyze a target company’s records, and market specialists to determine a company’s place in the global market are relatively easy to find, specialist English-speaking IT researchers are not common in Japan.

Even IT professionals from outside Japan may find it hard to come to terms with the differences of Japanese IT culture, let alone the problems caused by the Japanese language.

Full biculturalism is a must in order to evaluate Japanese IT. In a j-views team, researchers are either long-term residents of Japan with extensive knowledge of the Japanese IT world, language and ways of doing business, or Japanese from the IT world who have broad experience of “other” (non-Japanese) business culture.

Looking inside the IT box

The following areas provide a broad overview of an enterprise’s IT operation. Naturally, the j-views team members have extensive experience within these fields:

• Desktop hardware and software deployment
• Data centre and server operations
• Networking and communications, including IP telephony and call center operations
• IT security and privacy issues

In addition, the following “invisible” IT issues are often overlooked, but nevertheless provide true indications of the management of the enterprise under investigation:

• Strategic and tactical capacity management with long-term strategic technology planning
• Business continuity and disaster recovery planning (in Japan, suffering from earthquakes and typhoons, this is especially important), together with availability and change management procedures and implementation
• Vendor relationships

All of these can have a significant impact on the success or failure of an enterprise, and without knowing the significant facts about these areas of a company's operations, it is difficult to make effective forecasts for the future.