By now the vast array of Web applications for supply-chain integration, customer relationship management, salesforce automation, work group collaboration —and the sale of everything from equities to automobiles — should make it perfectly clear that information technology has evolved beyond the role of mere infrastructure in support of business strategy. In more and more industries today, IT is the business strategy.
The implications for existing and aspiring CEOs are equally clear. Information technology is now a survival issue. Board and executive team agendas are increasingly peppered with, or even hijacked by, a growing range of IT issues. They may be explicitly IT — the company’s progress towards millennium compliance, the IT consequences of a merger or acquisition, the desired profile of a new CIO — but more and more frequently IT issues are now wrapped inside wider questions of business strategy.
What is the e-commerce opportunity for our business and how do we organize for it? As we seek to “think global and act local,” must we commit to a new generation of enterprise-wide IT systems? What combination of organizational change and new technology is required for a breakthrough in knowledge management? As one CEO said to us recently, “Nearly every strategic issue we address is now triggered by IT or has consequences for IT.” Or as one... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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