Nestle S.A. is one too. So is Lorenzo Zambrano of Cemex in Mexico, Massimo Bongiovanni, CEO of Coop Centrale in Italy and Toshifumi Suzuki, CEO of 7-Eleven Japan. What do these global business leaders have in common that sets them apart from the majority of top management in other organizations? They are IT Savvy BUSINESS leaders. That means they communicate an organizing vision which affords a central role to leveraging IT for value creation; they engage themselves in strategic IT decisions and insist that their top management team does as well; they construct an equal partnership between business and IT ,and they achieve superior returns for their efforts. According to research by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross[1], firms with higher IT spending and high IT savvy can achieve 20 percent greater margins than their competitors, whereas the lowest spenders and least IT savvy firms earn 32 percent lower margins than their competitors.
Naturally with this sort of performance lift, most CEO’s, in fact most business leaders across the organization, must be IT savvy – right? Unfortunately the answer is “Not yet.” As for evidence, it is visible or can be deduced in headline-grabbing events about IT project failures, rigid information systems which reduce a company’s local and/or global agility, layoffs at firms due to inefficient operations and security breaches and data losses. All of these occurrences signal deficiencies in leveraging information technology effectively. Blame for these problems should lay with the business people responsible for IT spending decisions and who own the role of extracting value from these investments. My research in this area suggests that one core reason for their persistence: a lack of IT-savvy business people leads to underperforming IT investments. Complimenting this insight is the fact that recent McKinsey surveys of business