This is the fourth installment of a five-part series on global corporate leadership. This article focuses on Information Technology
Economics (Debt)
Environmental factors
Political factors
Technology
Social Factors
The series taken as a whole should help you determine the answer for your company's nine questions:
Who are the consumers of the future?
How will my company distribute its products or services in the future?
Who are my competitors in 10 years? 25 years?
What be the source of competitive advantage to my company in the future?
What skills or capabilities will make my company unique?
What role is the strategic alliances / mergers / acquisitions play in its approach?
How will my company change the nature the competition in its industry?
How will my organization redefine the boundaries between industry?
What can my company do to create a new industry?
The Opportunity
For many years, the companies have devoted more than half of their capital budgets on information technology, and have acted under the simplistic assumption that the results' improved information 'on more productive. Both companies are based not on their investments in computer careful calculations of return or added value, but the culture and political aspects. Successful information system should be more focused on relationships and interactions than the information itself.
The solution
Tomorrow's strategic technology investments that shows more options for organizations than they know what to do. Company will be set up the technology that best fits their organization rather than the other way around. The value organizations get from the investment depends on foresight and intelligence to go in identifying how their people use technology.
Although in many situations where the better performance that result, even the improved access to information often little or no effect on the human behavior. Most of us are aware of the dangers of smoking. Yet millions of people still take the customer. Although there should be strong links between information and behavior businesses, the real problem with most executives face is not insufficient information, it is the unwillingness of organizations to change behavior in front of good information.
In an industry-wide level (micro level), some companies get strong returns on their digital technology investments. What really seems, however, is that a macro level more money is wasted in computerization than has been created.
No denies that computerization and networking can add great value. But when we look forward in numbers, it is clear that the company is not basing their investments in computer careful calculations back or extra cost. Other factors such as culture, politics, fashion, and competition also came into play. Best-practice methodologies often are not related to model many companies investing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in computer and network.
A fundamental difference between managing a information system and running a business with information, such as a difference between operating a rivet gun and making airplanes. Managers aim to promote technical systems subscribe to different values and practices of managers trying to set up productive business environment for their workers. Operating a business information is a much larger volume of interaction and cooperation in the management of an information system.
When managers try to fit inflexible, mechanistic organic system context, they need new vocabularies to explain how people in organizations actually use the system.
In fact, the term information loses its edge when redefined in the context of the business; culture and politics and relationships in general may be at least as important.
Does the organization want to use its network to centralize or decentralize responsibility? The business want to make each piece of data available to everybody all the time? Or it wants to build a new information-access hierarchy to its intranet? Should individual rewards for sharing information? Should people be encouraged to initiate electronic relationships with employees in other departments? Or should Brotherhood all the department is deemed an inappropriate use of the network? Currently, these rhetorical questions that provide food for thought, but some us to encounter them in our everyday business life.
Conclusion
If an organization decides to improve the way uses information, it should focus first on changing the culture of sharing. Most managers know some information about the design of incentives for enterprise collaboration, more invoking it. That is why responsible information departments have to insist from the beginning that effective enterprise computing and groupware independent with transparency, replication, and semi-structured database. It depends on how the individual is rewarded and punished for distributing and withholding information. These are about behavior, culture, and politics.
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