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.