Executive Briefing: Winning with ICT, Competingon Competency – an ITCapability Maturity Approach

Information Technology (IT) is emerging as one of the most dominant forces that are changing business, and indeed society, today. Increasingly, we are seeing the collision of Moore’s law with all types of business to produce great entrepreneurial and business opportunities. Although technology, driven by Moore’s law, is advancing at a very fast rate, the management practices used to manage and apply IT appear to be lagging significantly. Despite Nicholas Carr’s assertion that “IT doesn’t matter” many firms are increasingly using IT to create and sustain competitive advantage. However the challenges of technology complexity, demand growth, security, budget and many others make the use and conversion of technology into value unpredictable and risky. The IT profession is in a catch 22 scenario at present. IT departments are underperforming and company management is unwilling to fund IT: in fact less funding is the dominant strategy these days. CEOs invest in those areas of the business that contribute to the core objectives of the business, typically looking for growth and margin, or new successful products and services. IT departments consume so much of their available resources to just maintain current performance levels (and do not always succeed in even achieving this), that there is little capacity for investing in innovation. This situation can continue to be a constantly downward spiral, unless IT can move from a reactive to proactive posture.