Would you let your dentist complete your tax return?
Would you be comfortable with your accountant giving you acupuncture?
Would you give your brother-in-law responsibility for your most valuable business growth tool – in his spare time?
Or maybe it’s the CEO or the marketing manager who has become your de facto IT Manager.
Just as we wouldn’t expect the dentist to do an accounting job, or the accountant to do a healthcare job, we can no longer afford to consult the CEO, marketing manager or a computer hobbyist when the computer is running slow or your network has stopped working.
And today, more and more businesses are waking up to the fact that good technology is a vital key to business success – so much so, that Information Technology (IT) is now the fastest growing industry on the planet. And the businesses that are using technology efficiently are also the businesses that are successful and growing.
This discovery was made by Professor Marco Iansiti, director of research at Harvard Business School. He read an article in the Harvard Business Review in 2003 entitled “IT Doesn’t Matter”. The article asserted that IT had become a commodity like electricity, and that it no longer gave strategic advantage to the organisations that employ it. Although a lot of people disagreed with his ideas, there was no actual research to prove otherwise and so Professor Marco Iansiti decided to do two studies.
