McKinsey on IT

The next frontier in IT strategy: A McKinsey Survey
IT executives say that they are now helping to shape business strategy but need to improve their ability to tap innovation. Download

Applying lean techniques to application development and maintenance
Lean techniques, originally developed to reduce waste in manufacturing, are boosting performance in more and more service environments. Application development and maintenance - the part of IT that works closely with the business to develop software services - is a good candidate for lean. Many processes around software development are poorly organized, resulting in rework, unbalanced workloads, and other forms of waste that harm both productivity and morale. The transformation to lean requires that companies identify and measure the main sources of waste and define opportunities to reduce it. Lean, like any major transformation, demands sustained leadership commitment and a thoughtful approach to introducing and rolling out change. Download 

Using IT to speed up clinical trials
The sooner a drug can pass its clinical trials, the bigger are the revenues before its patent expires. The first wave of IT innovations to streamline the clinical-trials process used electronic data capture to speed up the collection and analysis of information. The second wave promises even greater savings if pharmaceutical companies adopt an end-to-end perspective by integrating the planning process for a number of trials and by creating modular, reusable tools to plan them. Pharmaceutical companies should also make electronic data capture easier for research physicians to use, perhaps by creating an industry standard. Download 

A smarter approach to data storage
Although the unit cost of data storage continues to fall rapidly, companies spend much more each year store and manage their growing volume of important information. Many companies spend too much, often because IT hasn’t clarified the trade-offs between different levels of storage service quality and their costs. A tiered menu of storage service levels and better communication within the business can help IT executives deliver better storage value. Download

The CEO as CIO: An interview with K. V. Kamath of ICICI
India’s largest private bank succeeds primarily because it can rapidly implement technologies, giving it a competitive edge, says the bank’s chief executive, K. V. Kamath. Kamath, CEO of the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI), considers information technology so central to the bank’s achievements that he manages it himself, without a CIO. Drawing inspiration from the culture and methodologies of Silicon Valley, Kamath has turned a stodgy industrial lender into a regional powerhouse with assets of $56 billion. Having learned to serve low-income consumers cost effectively in India, ICICI now is exploring other markets. Download