Laywers and red tape sink IT business

FORMER HP director Tom Perkins has complained that the boards of IT companies have too few geeks.

He said that the technological people are being marginalised by those who are obsessed with legal and regulatory compliance.

According to SiliconValley.com, Perkins said that despite this obsession, outfits cannot detect an Enron or WorldCom-type fraud because board members don't fully understand a company's business.

Perkins told the VentureOne conference in San Francisco that there was an alarming trend in corporate America of compliance-obsessed directors with no expertise in the firm's business setting the agenda on big company boards.

He hit out at what he called “plug-to-plug compatible directors” who think that they can equally capable of serving on a bank board as on that of a technology outfit such as HP. Perkins said that the recent spying row was created by an argument over such 'governance'.

Worried about how IBM and Dell were trouncing HP, Perkins set up a technology committee which audited HP's spending on research and development.

This group became powerful in HP and threatened Dunn who killed it off. He said that Dunn's search for a leaker on the HP board was her backhanded way of killing the technology committee and evolving into a compliance board “untroubled by worries about technology and marketing strategy.”

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