What’s your relationship with technology? If you’re the type of manager who thinks it’s something best left to the IT department, the strength of your profit margins may depend on a change of attitude.
At least, that’s the message of a new book by MIT Sloan School of Management researchers Peter Weill and Jeanne W. Ross called IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain.
“Firms with above average IT spending and IT savvy have 20 percent higher margins…and firms with above average IT infrastructure spending and IT savvy have revenue growth three percentage points higher than their industry average,” Weill said in an MIT press release.
The book outlines the steps a company can take to better integrate its IT operations throughout the whole company and translate those integrated operations into profitable growth. But why can’t you just leave that to the IT department? Because managers with IT expertise are key to figuring out how to best use their IT spending to improve overall processes.
“Often, [IT] spending is a decentralized process so local projects may meet local needs, but don’t scale or connect together and create a maintenance nightmare. The person who suffers is the customer who has to jump across silos for service throughout the organization,” says Weill.
As a decentralized-IT worst-case scenario, Weill cites the company that makes a customer update her new address with six different departments. Needless to say, this company isn’t using IT in a way that gains customers and profits. The authors boil it down to a key point: As all businesses become more and more digitized, the ones that flourish will be the ones that do it well.
Is your company ready for the digital economy? What steps are you taking to get there?
Computer image courtesy of Flickr user Wonderlane, CC 2.0
