McKinsey on Business Technology

Eight business technology trends to watch
A number of new and emerging technologies - many aimed at enhancing the way the Internet is used - promise to change how companies innovate, managers make decisions, and businesses lower costs, tap talent, or realize new business opportunities. Although technology always promises benefits, actually gaining them requires a good understanding of its real business implications and of the concomitant managerial changes. Over the next decade, eight technology-enabled business trends will really matter. Smart managers should start doing their homework now. Download

From internal service provider to strategic partner: An interview with the head of Global Business Services at P&G
Filippo Passerini, the head of P&G’s Global Business Services (GBS), describes how his organization evolved to become a strategic partner with the company’s operating units. He explains that the consolidation of dispersed local support units, the outsourcing of nonstrategic service functions, and the blending of IT with other services helped the company to cut costs substantially and gave GBS a new role as a provider of innovative solutions in customer interactions and product development. The new challenge, he says, is to adopt a project-oriented work style as GBS takes productivity and IT-driven innovation to the next level. Download

The next step in open innovation
The Internet and new social-networking technologies are allowing companies and their customers to interact with unprecedented levels of richness. Some leading organizations are using this opportunity to draw customers into the heart of the product development process. Cocreating products and services with customers, however, is uncertain territory, fraught with challenges and questions—for instance, who owns the resulting intellectual property? Nonetheless, smart companies are now beginning to encourage their customers to help them develop the products and services consumers really want. Download

Succeeding at open-source innovation: An interview with Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker
Few organizations have as much experience harnessing the talents of people outside their corporate walls as does Mozilla Corporation, the developer of the open-source Firefox Web browser. The company depends on volunteers for product-development decisions, software coding, distribution, and promotion. Mitchell Baker has helped lead the project to develop the browser since its origins, in the late 1990s. In this interview, she talks about the balance between maintaining control and letting motivated people run with their passions. As the Firefox browser has gained market share, it has become a prominent example of a successful open-source project. Baker says that a traditional organization could not have achieved this success. Download

Building the Web 2.0 enterprise: McKinsey global survey results
Companies have adopted more Web 2.0 tools this year than in 2007 and are using them for higher-value purposes, according to McKinsey’s second annual survey on the business use of Web 2.0 technologies. Some 21 percent of the respondents are very satisfied with the way their companies use Web 2.0 tools, which are changing management practices and even organizational structures. Other companies report that the barriers to adopting Web 2.0 tools include management’s inability to grasp their potential financial returns, unresponsive corporate cultures, and less-than-enthusiastic leadership. Download

Meeting the demand for data storage
Data storage has become one of the fastest-growing parts of the IT budget, thanks to enterprise-wide transactional systems, massive data warehouses, and explosive growth in e-mail traffic. If storage costs continue their rapid rise, they could make it harder for companies to store and exploit new forms of data. Companies often store many more copies of data than they need, partly out of concerns about losing information and partly because of poor planning. In most cases, they could meet legal, regulatory, and strategic needs with simpler storage configurations. IT executives should develop better policies for managing storage and for communicating more effectively to their internal clients the trade-offs of cost, reliability, accessibility, and risk. Developing a menu of storage options, each with a clear cost attached, can help IT executives work with the business to develop a more efficient storage organization. Download

Managing IT to support rapid growth: An interview with the CIO of NetApp
As the CIO for a rapidly growing storage vendor, Marina Levinson had to scale the IT organization quickly so that it could handle not only its current tasks but also whatever might be on the horizon. Keeping systems up and running is just the beginning; the way the IT function uses resources to satisfy the demands of the business determines the real value of information technology. In this interview, Levinson explains how she has organized her team to work closely with the business in order to ensure that IT’s investments match the organization’s strategic priorities. Even in the tech-friendly realm of Silicon Valley, IT leaders struggle to inspire their own people - and the business colleagues who depend on them - to move beyond an order-taking mentality by striving to understand the needs of the business and proposing innovative solutions to its problems. Download

Managing IT in a downturn: Beyond cost cutting
As the economic slowdown intensifies, companies are looking for ways to cut costs, and IT budgets are a prime target. Rather than implement across-the-board cuts, managers should take a more integrated view of how IT is used throughout the business. Targeted IT investments can make operations more efficient and increase revenues, delivering returns larger than simple cost-cutting measures typically do. Download