After nearly two decades, technologists and strategists are still working out a productive alliance in the business world. Many companies accept that information technology enables their competitive edge, but their efforts to partner it with business are failing. A critical disconnect persists between strategy and technology, which is why a company can spend years planning IT initiatives and implement only half of them. Or why a bank can outsource its failing IT function in the mid-1990s and still be unhappy years later when IT has improved but its business processes have stagnated.
Part of the problem is that strategy has become a moving target — it’s hard to build a technology platform to support visions based on capabilities a company might have. To explore exactly how difficult it is, we surveyed chief executive officers and chief information officers at 97 companies in the United States, Europe and Australia that had moved or were moving to e-business.1 Predictably, most were responding to an increasingly volatile business environment by shrinking their development and planning cycles. Half don’t extend plans beyond a year, and half of those with infrastructure plans update them quarterly. Some companies prefer to keep even short-term planning loose, calling themselves “managers of change” or “providers of project solutions.”
The shifting competitive landscape is creating a larger gap between strategists and technologists. Executives... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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