As we pointed out in Part I of this two-part Executive Report series, some may argue that IT's capacity to contribute to business competitiveness has faded, but we suggest instead that it has evolved and expanded, maturing and changing within a subset of companies that have effectively managed to use IT in various ways. However, it's important to note that not all companies achieve equal success with their mature approaches to IT-based capability and value creation.

Thus, in this two-part Executive Report series, we examine the current status of the use of IT to improve organizational capabilities and promote business value, identifying varieties of use and directional trends as well as managerial challenges and critical success factors. We carry out this examination through five cases of real organizations striving to use IT to develop capabilities and business value.

In Part I, we examined our first two case studies: the Boeing 787 and JPMorgan Chase. The Boeing 787 case demonstrated a product-driven innovation project, while JPMorgan Chase illustrated the enhancement of capabilities involving mergers. Along with a detail review of these cases, we also pointed out specific management difficulties, which we will again do here in Part II with the remaining three cases. Management difficulties confronted in execution often accumulate until they reach a level in which the value realized is substantially reduced, or, in some cases, in which the difficulties become so overwhelming, the projects are terminated (or worse). Consequently, our research methodology in this report series strives to separate analysis of the potential IT-based capabilities and value from issues of management difficulty on the way to potential benefits.

THE REMAINING CASES

As first outlined in Part I, here's a review of Cases 3-5:

• Case 3: Delta XYZ's troubled social media implementation. Delta XYZ (a fictitious name) had a grand plan to increase its rate of innovation by deploying social media technology throughout the company. Delta XYZ executed the deployment but achieved much less value than it had hoped. This case shows how organizational norms and culture interact and how they can curtail the possibilities for realizing IT capabilities and value creation.

• Case 4: Crowdsourcing as a new initiative. This case explores an examination of several companies, all of whom have built business models around the emerging value-creation paradigm of crowdsourcing. We have included this collection of mini-cases because we wanted to examine IT value creation in leading-edge areas. This part of our study demonstrates that even within a seemingly narrow category of value creation, there is much variety in how value creation happens.

• Case 5: Ascent Media's transition to digital services. The Ascent Media Group traditionally warehoused physical media (film, videotape, etc.) for its movie and TV studio clients, conducting business in ways that deployed IT to realize physical efficiencies. Under the threat of increasing media digitization, the company opted to move toward a vision that would create advantages in a more digital future. This meant a serious break from the past, using IT in new ways to realize new categories of value. The case demonstrates a wide variety of execution difficulties. In many ways, the Ascent case illustrates, better than any of our other cases (with the possible exception of Boeing), the full cycle of how IT can create new capabilities and value through a total transformation of a firm's business model.

FINDINGS FROM CROSS-CASE ANALYSIS

We end this two-part series with 12 general conclusions on how IT created value across all the cases:

1. IT plus "digitization" continues to be a source of competitive advantage for firms in various ways, some of them quite new.

2. Companies evolve through three phases as they expand and mature their uses of IT to achieve new organizational capabilities and business value.

3. Companies experience different degrees of success in accessing more advanced ways of using IT to create new capabilities and business value.

4. A company's ability to acquire, retain, and engage employees with high levels of integration skills appears critical to its ability to transition to more advanced modes of IT value creation.

5. Identifying managers who might obstruct movement toward more advanced IT-based value creation and fashioning practical strategies for dealing with those "blockers" is critical to the realization of advanced capabilities.

6. The effective management and coordination of an IT-enabled, virtually integrated organization is a newly emerging challenge fraught with risks.

7. Success in advanced capabilities and differentiating value creation though the use of IT may require an investment, both in technologies and organizational process and culture change, to reach a minimum threshold before achieving real value.

8. Industry expertise matters for effective IT leadership and the associated organizational restructuring necessary for capturing potential strategic IT value.

9. Faulty division of work between human and IT resources -- automating things that should not be, for example, or automating them too completely without appropriate scope for human judgment to enter into outcomes -- is a source of threat to the viability of companies and even industries.

10. Organizational norms concerning "openness" and "closedness" in communication strongly determine the realization of advanced capabilities and value creation.

11. Creation of advanced IT-enabled capabilities to support innovation and emergent value requires constantly adding weak ties to the organization.

12. IT and digitization will continue to have a major impact on the changing nature of work, including where and how companies perform work.

Without a doubt, we confirm that IT can contribute to strategic benefits. Our message for senior managers, therefore, is that they must take the possibility to achieve new strategic opportunity from IT seriously. Even in companies not yet ready to reach for such benefits, managers must keep an eye on the possibility that competitors might reach for and achieve mature capabilities and value. And, unless the company is prepared to be a "fast follower," it could risk serious and lasting "too late to catch-up" competitive disadvantages, even to the point of eventual bankruptcy. The challenges inherent in trying to achieve IT value in new ways will not go away until you embrace them. It's up to you.