Dr. Peter Weill, Chair of the Center for Information Systems Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Source of caption information and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.
(p. R2) DR. WEILL: The IT-savvy companies are 21% more profitable than non-IT-savvy companies. And the profitability shows up in two ways. One is that IT-savvy companies have identified the best way to run their core day-to-day processes. Think about UPS or Southwest Airlines or Amazon: They run those core processes flawlessly, 24 hours a day.
The second thing is that IT-savvy companies are faster to market with new products and services that are add-ons, because their innovations are so much easier to integrate than in a company with siloed technology architecture, where you have to glue together everything and test it and make sure that it all works. We call that the agility paradox–the companies that have more standardized and digitized business processes are faster to market and get more revenue from new products.
Those are the two sources of their greater profitability: lower costs for running existing business processes, and faster innovation.
For the full interview, see:
Martha E. Mangelsdorf, interviewer. “EXECUTIVE BRIEFING; Getting an Edge From IT; Companies need to think strategically about their tech investments.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., November 30, 2009): R2.
(Note: bold in original.)