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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

The Next Big Impact

Kris Gopalakrishnan
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Kris Gopalakrishnan
Business wants to achieve three things - higher growth, higher profits and better asset efficiency. Together, they impact shareholder value. IT helps in achieving these by enabling operational excellence and innovation.

IT has achieved a lot. The earliest generation of IT – the mainframe generation – brought enormous number crunching power. In the beginning, its application was in simple things like payroll processing, etc. However today, the number crunching power of IT is used for things like gene sequencing, which is extremely important. The next generation of IT brought the computing power to every desktop and impacted business productivity. Then came the Internet generation of IT, brought about by the marriage of the computer and telecommunications, and it has started impacting the quality of our lives. We don’t have to stand in a queue for withdrawing money from the banks or to buy a movie ticket and we can stay connected with friends and relatives today. But I feel that we will be seeing the real impact of IT in the coming years. Whatever has happened till now is only the movement on the runway. The impact of IT is about to take off.

The future impact of IT will be in the area of operational excellence and innovation, but the theatre of action for IT will change and expand significantly. In operational excellence, for example, there will be three significant impact areas – organizational simplification, corporate performance architecture and management and corporate governance.

Organizations have to simplify the entangled web of discrete processes and systems that run today. This will be totally driven by IT. The end goal is to have a flat, agile organization that can respond in real-time with zero latency. Organizations must have a single digital nervous system.

Corporate performance architecture & management will be the skeletal and muscular system of the organization. Strategies must be linked to activities. Metrics processes and systems must get integrated. IT will be the ligaments and the tendons. Companies will model, track and optimize their performance; much like a sportsman or an athlete does to his or her body. The idea is to achieve predictability and sustainability of business results with profitability and de-risking.


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