Prologue
Information technology has largely been available to businesses for the past five or six decades. Many businesses in the West and around the world have been leveraging IT to be competitive and achieve scales of business economies across various layers of their organizations — operations, offerings, supply chain, business partnerships, workforce productivity, sales, etc.
However, leveraging IT cost-effectively and seamlessly in an integrated way catering to 360 degrees of constituents an organization remains an unsolved jigsaw puzzle for most of the organizations in emerging economies (e.g. BRIC[1] Nations) and sizable companies in developed nations in today’s globalized economy.
The following chart is a representation of where various industries stand in adapting and leveraging IT for achieving scales of economy, efficiency, winning, retaining their customers and staying as leaders in their respective businesses for longer periods. As you can see, very few organization are above the lower threshold of adaption and leveraging IT — which is a minimal point of true technology RoIs[2].
Figure 1: IT Adaption and Leverage Across Businesses
IT leverage drivers
Some of the key factors that influence espousing and leveraging IT by the organizations across industries are:
- Type of business (new age or traditional)
- Average education level of the organizations
- Minimal IT usage skill level of the organization
- Complexity of IT solutions
- Cohesiveness of multiple IT subsystems
- Multitude of IT vendors
- IT investment (upfront and operating)
- Operational efficiency goals
- Global business opportunities and competition
- Seamless and sufficient data connectivity (wired, wireless, urban, remote, etc.)
- State promotion and subsidies on IT usage
