Posts from: 2015

Blog Post

Digital Advantage Comes from Responsive IT

In a digital age, business survival depends on responsive IT. That is one of three key findings from a recent global survey of 750 business and technology leaders that I led for HBR Analytic Services ("The Leadership Edge in Digital Transformation"). Almost half of respondents (47%) said their organization had missed opportunities because IT was too slow to respond. While it's reasonable to expect some misses, companies with slow-to-respond IT departments were much more likely to say this at 64% than were respondents from companies with responsive IT (only 27% said they'd missed opportunities).

Companies with highly responsive IT (let's just call them the "Leaders" for brevity's sake) have gone faster and farther in making the transition to digital business than their competitors. This proved to be the case across many dimensions, starting with the ways in which they engage with customers: 68% of the Leaders said their customer engagement had been transformed by their use of new technologies compared with only 33% of Laggards. The delta was even greater when it came to business model transformation, with 62% of Leaders transformed compared with only 24% of Laggards. This translates directly to competitive advantage.

Blog Post

Digital Innovation and the CIO

Business leaders anticipate dramatic change in all aspects of their operations over the next three years, according to recent research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (you can download a copy of the report I authored, Business Transformation and the CIO Role, at the HBR website). Some companies are accelerating this change by committing to IT-enabled business innovation as a core strategy. To understand just how massive the changes will be, consider this: 70 percent of these “innovation accelerators" (about a third of respondents) expect the ways in which they engage with customers to be transformed in three years, rating it eight or higher on a 10-point change scale. That's right: 70 percent. Transformed. Sixty-four percent anticipate that same degree of change in their products and services, their business models and the ways employees work.