Back
Just got back from NYC last night. It's a fun place and it was nice to kind of switch off the brain for a few days - see a show, go to some clubs, eat lots of food, run in Central Park, etc.
I thought I was going to write about something else, but I read a piece this morning on MSI from the Harvard Business Review that discussed the place of IT in business strategy. Basically, the premise was that IT is becoming a commodity and that, although commodities may be important for the operation of an enterprise, they are irrelevant to strategy. At first, I thought I would disagree with this proposition since I see many firms who use IT very well and extract competitive advantage from it (the two obvious ones that come to mind are Dell and Wal-mart). However, it does seem that strategy is independent of the IT structure of most companies, even those examples mentioned. For example, Wal-mart might have a very sophisticated logistics and data warehousing capability, but it just supports their overall strategy of being the low-cost retailer. Same with Dell - they may have very sophisticated supply chain capabilities but that is not their strategy.
The conclusion reached by the article was that IT should be boring - just a simple matter of execution. In some senses, I believe this. You do have to do a really excellent job of executing and supporting the strategy. Only in very rare cases is a fundamental corporate strategy going to revolve around IT. But, there is some call for innovation even in the setting of operational excellence. Creating better ways to use what you have even though it is based on a commodity is still a source of fundamental advantage. Otherwise, why would Wal-mart have sued Amazon when some of their people were recruited into similar positions at the start-up retailer a few years ago? Although competitive advantage can very rarely be gleaned from IT alone, it can be achived by an alignment of business strategy and IT. Which, to me, is the real trick and far from boring.