New Zealand Engineering 1999 March

Editorial

Profile Again

I worked as a news reporter on NBR and the Dominion covering computers and technology for many years before coming to New Zealand Engineering. In some ways I thought engineering would be the same as the computer industry. After all the best information technology consultants often were engineers, and the IT industry looked to engineers for leadership in matters such as project management. Engineers too were finding computers ubiquitous so I figured that engineering would be similar to IT but provide wider scope to cover other issues.

Well, I was right and I was wrong.

I was right about scope. As a news reporter I would never have read through a stack of paper a foot high trying to understand the ins and outs of climate change and economic instruments. To even read further than an accompanying press release is considered investigative journalism in some circles. But I was fundamentally wrong about the similarity between IT and engineering.

The essential difference is marketing. In IT marketing is everything. IBM for example, has built some enormously complex systems in its almost 100 years of existence, but IBM is not an engineering company. It is first and foremost a marketing company. It lives, breathes and thinks marketing, as do other IT companies much much smaller than IBM. Small importers and even quite large local IT consultancies spend considerable time and effort on their press relations.

As an IT reporter you are constantly dealing with an industry clamouring for attention. Visiting bigwigs are wheeled in to make pronouncements on the future of the industry, new products are being rolled out faster than you can keep up, conspiratorial phone calls come in from people dumped by their employers or getting dirty on their competitors, junkets abound. To serve the marketing needs of computer firms there are at least half a dozen public relations consultancies.

Compare this effort with New Zealand’s top half dozen engineering consultancies with at least 3,000 staff. To name them: Beca Carter Hollings & Ferner; Opus International Consultants; Woodward-Clyde; Worley International; Kingston Morrison; and Montgomery Watson. These companies dwarf most New Zealand IT firms. How many full time PR staff do they have between them? One - and the contents of New Zealand Engineering will quickly reveal who she works for.