Peter Weill: IT Savvy Can Be a Strategic Asset

As much as companies leveraged brand development over the past decade, senior managers are now turning their attention to developing robust IT strategies to attain competitive advantage.

photo credit: Mihael.Mafy

In IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go From Pain to Gain, Peter Weill explores this approach and has discovered that companies that are “IT Savvy”—those companies with IT departments good enough to be a strategic asset rather than a strategic liability—tend to be more profitable than their less savvy counterparts.

Weill, who is chairman of the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Information Systems Research, recently told the Sloan Management Review:

One of the most important decisions senior executives make is which business processes should be shared across the business and which shouldn’t. For example, UPS has decided it will have one process for picking up a package across the world. Whereas Procter & Gamble has decided it will leave the local marketing units to figure out how they will go to market, but the company will have shared standardized services for HR, finance and IT.

Those are two very different operating models—and both can work. Making the decision about what kind of operating model you want, and having the discipline to stick to it and the governance to enforce it, is what makes an IT-savvy company.

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It turns out the top-performing companies, the IT-savvy companies, do this instinctively. They don’t call it an operating model, but their executives make the decision about which business processes will be standardized and which ones will be integrated throughout the business.

You can read Weill’s entire interview here.

Here are other articles I have written on this topic:

• Catechetical Plan
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 10: Team Briefing
• Writing a Strategic Communications Plan: Evaluation
• The Politics of Strategic Choice
• NBC Outsources Promotion Role to NY Agency
• Three Ideas To Position Yourself for the Recovery
• Book Review: Lean Six Sigma for Service
• Is There Any Strategy in Your Strategic Plan?
• The Importance of Core Purpose
• Book Review: 12: The Elements of Great Managing