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【作者(必填)】Marwaha S and Willmott P

【文题(必填)】Managing IT for scale , speed , and innovation

【年份(必填)】2006

【全文链接或数据库名称(选填)】https://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/managing-it-scale-speed-innovation/

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Managing IT For Scale, Speed And Innovation


   
By Sam Marwaha and Paul Willmott
The CIO of a large company with global operations faced a problem. The chief executive had asked him to manage the company's shared services for finance, human resources and procurement. On the one hand, the CIO thought it made sense to have one person in charge as the company standardized its back-office activities on a common enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform and moved some of them to low-cost locations.

Such a program fit in well with the CIO's advocacy of better integration between information technology and business functions. On the other hand, he was concerned that combining commodity services with IT would send the wrong message to the business units, since he had been urging them to view IT as a strategic function. He also worried that running back-office shared services in a strict and standard way, giving virtually no flexibility to the business units, would conflict with his goal of building a collaborative partnership with them in order to use technology to win in the marketplace.

This CIO's difficulty is becoming increasingly common. Leading companies are aggressively standardizing the back office globally, so they can operate efficiently and free business unit leaders to focus on getting products to market faster and commercializing them more effectively.

These companies are also taking more risks, experimenting with ideas that will disrupt existing business models. This growing multiplicity of ways for IT to support strategies has exacerbated communication problems between IT and the business--problems that have long been a source of dissatisfaction for both sides. Traditional fixes such as governance bodies and processes are increasingly overengineered and don't always deliver the hoped for results.1

Our work with companies in many sectors shows that the answer involves adopting what we call differentiated IT governance: integrating IT with the business area it supports and matching the management of IT to the management of the business. A few leading companies, for example, manage the IT that supports the global back office for scale while they manage the IT that supports front-office functions for speed and distinctiveness--with different leaders, structures, decision-making processes, skills and incentives for each. In addition, these companies are searching for ways to manage IT-enabled business innovation apart from the rest of the business, using different metrics.

This new approach must also be dynamic. Over time, cutting-edge IT-enabled business capabilities become commodity systems as rivals adopt them. Managing that migration is an additional challenge for executives. A few years ago, for instance, electronic data capture was a new force in the pharmaceutical sector, where it helped pioneering companies gain a competitive edge in clinical development. At the time, developers of these systems had to allow for customization. Today, electronic data capture is more prevalent in the sector--a requirement to stay in the race--so companies must now focus on ensuring the use of off-the-shelf packages and standard, low-risk operations.

Companies also need to be more proactive about migrating tasks from one category to another. While most technologies move downstream, from cutting edge to commodity, a few head in the opposite direction--for instance, when simple transactions can be analyzed more carefully to deliver new insights. At many companies, however, the interface between businesses and IT has become too complicated to ensure that these requirements are addressed as they change.

Finally, while most companies have experience managing IT for efficiency or for speed and business responsiveness, far fewer know how to harness IT-enabled business innovations for competitive advantage. Without an adequate investment in innovation, companies can't seed the front end of the technology cycle with ideas that will help them enter new businesses or change the rules in existing ones.

Sam Marwaha and Paul Willmott are principals in McKinsey's global IT practice and co-leaders of the IT governance and organization practice. Marwaha, who also leads the U.S. pharmaceutical IT practice, is based in New York, and Willmott is based in London.