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Business value of IT

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Tutorial: Flexing the IT muscle for flexibility and innovation
Anand Kulkarni
Despite compelling applications for responding to market and competitive pressures, the prevailing notion of 'IT=Operational Advantage' has managed to stick around. Benefits continue to be measured from an operational perspective. Though sometimes non-quantifiable, IT helps an organization achieve flexibility and innovation through experimentation in shorter time at lesser cost, making a case for more experimentation as a means for increasing the chances of success.

Perspective : How IT matters to those that matter
Srinivas Padmanabhuni & Robin Thomas Panicker
A crucial learning from the failed attempts to make IT run businesses as in large scale ERP experiences and the Internet bull run of the late 90s have focused on the need to deviate from the overemphasis on IT being at the core of everything. Many companies have used IT successfully to stay at the top of their competitive landscape. Wal-Mart, DELL, GM, Fed Ex, ebay, Yahoo and others exemplify the need for IT and its role in creating new value proposition lending us confidence that IT indeed matters to companies that matter.

Trend : The Life Sciences challenge
Thillai Rajan Annamalai
Over the past few years, drug development costs have sky rocketed and have outpaced research spending. How can IT ease the pressure on an industry on the edge? Global outsourcing can result in a saving of about 20 to 40 per cent of new drug development costs. Electronic Data Capture of clinical trial data, which is today mostly done on paper, is far less expensive. Bayer estimates a saving of 90 per cent in data clarification costs.

Debate : Why do companies fail or succeed with IT?
Shanmuganathan Nagasundaram
While it would be difficult to establish a cause-effect relationship between business value of a firm and the role of IT due to the multiplicity of factors involved, it is important to look at the role of IT in generating sustainable competitive advantage. The translation to business value may have differed for many companies that have used IT given their industry structures primarily because of their inability to rightly distinguish between applications of IT that sustain competitive advantage and those that enhance operational efficiencies.

Framework: Managing Risks in IT initiatives: A CXO guide
Dayasindhu Nagarajan, Sriram Padmanabhan & Jamuna Ravi
Even though there has been improvements in on-time and on-budget delivery of IT projects, the instances of successful projects have not been heartening. A large contributor to the gap in expectations has been found to be ineffective risk management where current practices limit treatment of risks to the boundaries of the IT project. As external program risks have a large influence in the successful outcome of IT projects, an integrated approach to risk management can alleviate risk pressures on project deadlines and budgets.

Practitioner's view : IT effectiveness: Lessons from an offshore IT services provider
Priya Kurien
Offshore IT services providers sometimes work as extended arms of the IT organizations of their clients, often working efficiently across multiple geographies and time zones, overcoming cultural differences and utilizing mature software processes for productivity and quality. At a time when economic considerations put tremendous pressure on IT departments to reduce cost and improve effectiveness, there are lessons large multinational companies can learn from offshore IT services providers in their quest for IT effectiveness.

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