The English lexicographer and essayist Samuel Johnson once observed that "knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
This succinct parsing of knowledge is still quite serviceable more than 200 years later. However, it's unlikely that even the learned Dr. Johnson could have imagined the abundance of information available today or the extraordinary array of technologies that help us find it, store it, share it and ultimately harness it to create business value.
The critical interplay of information, technology and value is the subject of this Outlook Special Edition, which is the outgrowth of more than six months of research at Accenture. The effort was undertaken at the behest of CEO Joe Forehand and Chief Strategy Officer Tim Breene; their objective was to determine which elements of technology actually drive business performance. Bob Suh, the Accenture managing partner responsible for strategy in the company's Technology, Alliances & Solutions group, was tapped to lead the project, which eventually would involve the contributions of an impressive roster of 30 technology experts from across the company.
Suh and his team interviewed dozens of CIOs as part of their research. "We knew it would be easy to criticize information technology after the equity market meltdown," he recalls. "We also knew that some companies were quietly making a big difference in their markets by leveraging IT. But it was difficult for these CIOs to quantify those results, and when earnings turned south, IT was an easy target." This dilemma, of course, went to the heart of his team's mandate to identify and document the contribution of technology to high-performance business.
As the work progressed and themes began to emerge, the team discussed its findings at several external venues in the United States, Europe and Asia, including the World Economic Forum, professional and industry conferences, and a classroom presentation at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Hypotheses were refined and messages were honed.
The end result is a bold and comprehensive new vision of how companies can use technology to create value by mastering four key aspects of IT: infrastructure, integration, industrialization and innovation.
"We were surprised to find how much potential value companies could derive from their existing investments in infrastructure," notes Suh. "But we were also concerned about the precarious situation at companies where the economic promise of IT was so close to being delivered, and yet the decision whether to continue or stop investing could go either way."
It's clear we've only scratched the surface when it comes to the ability of technology to drive better top- and bottom-line business value. But as Suh points out, "It takes discipline and hard work to get it right."
David Cudaback
Editor-in-Chief
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