Managing Alignment Risks series: Part I

  Managing Alignment Risks series: Part I

Nicholas Carr's now-famous article "IT Doesn't Matter" (Harvard Business Review, May 2003) generated more than its share of controversy. The thesis of Carr's argument is that information technology has become more tactical than strategic, that the creative use of technology is much less likely to differentiate one business from a competitor today than it was in the 1990s.

Things are changing. In Part I, I looked at how organizations are adapting to new business requirements and emerging technology capabilities. Are you ready for these changes and the challenges they present? We expect a lot from our leaders, our vendors, our customers, ourselves, and even our investors. In addition to old skills, we now need skills in specific new areas.

So what skills are necessary to optimize the business-technology relationship in the early 21st century?

 

How do you want to be remembered? Not that you're going anywhere soon, but if you were to define company roles going forward, what would they look like? The data we've been tracking for a while now suggests that big changes are in the works, that business technology is bifurcating into at least two broad categories: operational and strategic technology.

 

We hear, almost daily, the phrases "business value," "business drivers," "IT value," and many other such words applied to the "connecting business to IT" discussion. Unfortunately, these phrases are often used as if the world has reached consensus on what they mean, how they can be defined in a given company, and what a manager can do to understand them in his or her own context. We all know that this just isn't true; and in fact, the vagueness of the definition often clouds the discussion, rather than helping it along.

 

IT's value -- its direct impact on the business -- results from business process improvements and better connections with customers and suppliers. As stated in the previous article, financially focused, ROI-type computations are inadequate because they cannot capture the critical aspects of process improvement and customer/supplier connections.

There's a rhetorical strategy familiar to anyone who nowadays tunes in to editorial content in the media: A commentator makes a radical assertion that seems plausible on the surface and that seems consistent with a trend. The commentator may not be particularly qualified to make the assertion. (Have you ever asked yourself why we ought to believe those people talking at us on TV news shows? When did we start accepting that someone who has strong opinions is some kind of an expert?) And usually the assertion doesn't bear up well under scrutiny.