Information technology plays a huge role in business today—but that doesn’t mean it’s always well-understood or well-managed by most executives. Peter Weill is out to change that.
Dr. Weill is chairman of the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Information Systems Research, where he studies how companies can increase the effectiveness of their IT investments. A co-author of IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go From Pain to Gain, Dr. Weill recently spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review senior editor Martha E. Mangelsdorf for Business Insight. Here are edited excerpts from that interview.
Standardize and Innovate
BUSINESS INSIGHT: Your newest book is about IT-savvy companies. How do you define IT savvy?
DR. WEILL: IT-savvy companies make information technology a strategic asset. The opposite of a strategic asset, of course, is a strategic liability. And there are many companies who feel their IT is a strategic liability. In those companies, the IT landscape is siloed, expensive and slow to change, and managers can’t get the data they want.
IT-savvy companies are just the opposite. They use their technology not only to reduce costs today by standardizing and digitizing their core processes, but the information they summarize from that gives them ideas about where to innovate in the future. A third element is that IT-savvy companies use their digital platform to collaborate with other companies in their ecosystem of customers and suppliers.
So, IT-savvy companies are not just about savvy IT departments. It’s about the whole company thinking digitally.
BUSINESS INSIGHT: You’ve done some research that suggests IT-savvy companies are more profitable than others. Tell me a bit about that.
DR. WEILL: The IT-savvy companies are 21% more profitable than non-IT-savvy companies. And the profitability shows up in two ways. One is that IT-savvy companies have identified the best way to run their core day-to-day processes. Think about UPS or Southwest Airlines or Amazon: They run those core processes flawlessly, 24 hours a day.
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Innovations in management theory & business strategy – a collaboration with The Wall Street Journal
The second thing is that IT-savvy companies are faster to market with new products and services that are add-ons, because their innovations are so much easier to integrate than in a company with siloed technology architecture, where you have to glue together everything and test it and make
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Thinking digitally,data minding process,visual analytics are new and very actual IT managment terms .
How to integrate ,in a savy company,applied algorithms of data analyse is the question .There is,still,no technical prescription -the solution is in creativity of those that combine the productive process and IT tecnology.