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Let’s face it, without IT, there’s no business. But, IT has always been viewed by business executives as a cost center, versus a strategic asset. A relatively new work published by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross puts forth some ideas how to turn this thinking around.
In IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain, Weill and Ross say forward-looking businesses are transforming themselves with technology. They are building a “platform of digitized processes,” which are integrated environments, often anchored by an ERP or CRM system.
The core of success through IT apparently rests on competing on analytics, in which data from all parts of the organization is brought in and presented, via dashboards and the like, as insightful information to decision-makers.
Weill and Ross cite the following corporate success stories:
Aetna: “Aetna… uses the data generated from its core transactions to empower decision makers…” The authors report that Aetna was on the brink of failure in 2002, but employed savvy IT to turn itself around within five years. The company employed an executive information system to employ data to drive decisions. “Firmwide delivery of transparent and consistent performance data gave them an opportinity to train the company how to think about problems… Armed with useful data, Aetna’s senior managers started making what one observer called ’surgical decisions’ on prices in their proposals to institutional customers. The executive information management system was just the first step in using IT to make Aetna’s people smarter and more productive… Aetna started providing customers online access to medical advice and information about their accounts and history. These efforts have transformed Aetna into a highly respected and profitable health care company.”
7-Eleven Japan (SEJ): “SEJ uses IT to empower its people — all its people — with information…. Every salesclerk at SEJ has access to a handheld device for ordering stock… a constant flow of graphical data, showing recent sales, weather conditions, and product range information…”
United Parcel Service: “UPS equips its drivers with a DIAD (delivery information acqusiion device), which captures a customer signature and uploads data on each delivery to the company’s package information database. UPS analyzes this data to better understand the profitability of individual customers and packages, which leads to improved routing and pricing decisions.”
The ability to quickly access enterprise information made a difference to these companies, and illustrate the power of valid, actionable information to work smarter and faster. These success stories didn’t happen overnight, of course — there was plenty of sweating to achieve back-end integration, develop enterprise data models, and get business units on board. It takes visionaries both within IT and in the business to make this all work.