MIT Sloan Management Review

Today’s companies process more than 60 terabytes of information annually, about 1,000 times more than a decade ago. But how well are companies managing the data and capitalizing on the opportunities it presents?

To answer these questions, seven IT research centers studied data-related activities at 26 corporations and large nonprofit organizations. The research shows that while the IT unit is competent at storing and protecting data, it cannot make decisions that turn data into business value.

Businesses’ ability to process numbers in “well-behaved rows and columns” goes back 40 years, notes K. Ananth Krishnan, chief technology officer of Tata Consultancy Services, one of the largest companies in India. Figuring out how to mine and process the information in text, video, and audio is the new frontier.

Almost all executives want more and faster information, and almost all companies are racing to provide it. What many of them overlook, though, is that the real aim should be not faster information but faster decision making — and those aren’t the same things.

How the smartest organizations are embedding analytics to transform information into insight and then action. Findings and recommendations from the first annual New Intelligent Enterprise Global Executive study.

MIT Sloan economist and digital-business expert Erik Brynjolfsson tells how the rising data flood and emerging tools for analyzing it are changing the ways innovation gets done.

In most large organizations, CEOs and senior management get the best technology and the best technology support, but this practice may actually put revenue at risk, according to two Unisys Corp. studies conducted over the last year.

Information technology remains a terrible bottleneck to growth in most companies, mainly because executives focus on the wrong remedy for their IT problems

During the e-boom of the 1990s, academics, consultants, executives and investors alike claimed that e-procurement, and its increasingly central role in supply-chain management, would revolutionize how future business-to-business practices would take place: Efficiencies would be improved and procurement costs reduced; the flow of information along the supply chain enhanced; strategic

Throughout an organization, individuals make decisions daily that influence the need for and the value received from information technology. A simple one-page framework can help companies allocate IT decision rights and accountabilities so that individual IT decisions align with strategic objectives.

Most companies today are using precious little of the computing power available to them through the machines and software they already own. PCs, servers and mainframes all sit idle much of time, while the people who operate them are away from the office or the plant.

Most organizations struggle to demonstrate business gains from investments in information technology. New research reveals how to meet the challenges of IT portfolio management to deliver tangible results.

How a diverse group of IT managers responsible for global technology infrastructure developed a way of working together that enabled Xerox to create and transfer knowledge more effectively.

A framework for aligning organizational and technical resources and capabilities to leverage explicit knowledge and expertise.

A powerful way to implement advanced software technologies is through incrementalism. Each self-contained implementation sequence achieves a specific business result. Using the strategy at a large manufacturer of office furniture systems, the authors implemented supply-chain-planning and-scheduling software at six sites — on time and within budget. The three critical success factors were technology divisibility, technology and methodology fit, and technology and organization fit.

Leading software developers use platform approaches to leverage technology into families of software products and systems.

As managers experience more volatile marketplaces, global competition, shortened product life cycles, customer pressures for tailored offerings and tighter performance standards, they increasingly depend on new information systems.

Expertise alone does not inspire trust and credibility. Successful IT specialists work on their trustworthiness and build good relationships with clients at the same time.

Creating a business-driven IT infrastructure requires that executives thoroughly understand their firm’s strategic context. By formulating a series of business and IT maxims — short simple statements of the business’s positions — managers can identify the IT infrastructure service suited to their company. Organizational, political, cultural, and reward system issues, as well as a lack of IT leadership, may form implementation barriers.

Successfully managing technological change involves the ability to improvise in response to unexpected opportunities. Organizational changes associated with technology implementation don’t have a beginning and an end; they are ongoing. The authors identify three types of change that build on each other over time. Two conditions that enable the use of an improvisational model are internal alignment and adequate resources.

Falling communication costs are enabling companies to decentralize their decision-making structures. Now they must seek a balance between empowerment and control.