Strategically Exploit IT; Don’t Just Enable Operations
I’m always pleased to read about IT as a strategic driver. It’s still so common to find executives who yet regard IT as a cost center that supports the business rather than a source of strategic advantage. This HBR article belts that one right down the center of the fairway. That said, the authors don’t seem to have spent a lot of time actually in the modern business environment, with all its practical limits and political compromises. He maintains, for instance, that every manager in a company should know the percentage of projects that are fully successful. I think it’s fair to say that there are a lot of executives who don’t need that information on a day to day basis, and at best should only be expected to know how to go about finding it out. And while I agree that following up after a project to find out whether it delivered the anticipated value is an excellent idea, in the hurly-burly of business there are plenty of projects for which it’s sufficient to go around the table and determine the consensus on the ultimate outcome, and then move on to more pressing business.
Still, lots of good stuff here, as usual in the HBR.
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