Investing in IT for Competitive Advantage

In 2008, Brynjolfsson and McAfee published a study in the Harvard Business Review on the role of IT in competitive advantage, entitled "Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference". Their study confirmed that IT can play a role in competitive advantage if deployed wisely. In their study, they drew three conclusions:

  • First, the data show that IT has sharpened differences among companies instead of reducing them. This reflects the fact that while companies have always varied widely in their ability to select, adopt, and exploit innovations, technology has accelerated and amplified these differences.
  • Second, good management matters. Highly qualified vendors, consultants, and IT departments might be necessary for the successful implementation of enterprise technologies themselves, but the real value comes from the process innovations that can now be delivered on those platforms. Fostering the right innovations and propagating them widely are both executive responsibilities – ones that can't be delegated.
  • Finally, the competitive shakeup brought on by IT is not nearly complete, even in the IT-intensive US economy. You can expect to see these altered competitive dynamics in other countries, as well, as their IT investments grow.

Information systems can be used for competitive advantage, but they must be used strategically. Organizations must understand how they want to differentiate themselves and then use all the elements of information systems (hardware, software, data, people, and process) to accomplish that differentiation.

Callback before_footer in local_aigrade component should be migrated to new hook callback for core\hook\output\before_footer_html_generation
  • line 7225 of /lib/moodlelib.php: call to debugging()
  • line 7292 of /lib/moodlelib.php: call to {closure}()
  • line 71 of /lib/classes/hook/output/before_footer_html_generation.php: call to get_plugins_with_function()
  • line 987 of /lib/classes/output/core_renderer.php: call to core\hook\output\before_footer_html_generation->process_legacy_callbacks()
  • line 154 of /mod/book/view.php: call to core\output\core_renderer->footer()