Measuring the Immeasurable

Measuring the Immeasurable
Is it productive to investing in IT? And how much? This topic has generated a lot of literature from academics and researchers, and still there is no good answer to it. One tends to think that if it didn't, then why would it happen. Simply said I think not only that it brings productivity; I think that IT investment today is inevitable.

However, the important thing in my view is a bit different: if everybody else is doing it, are you going to get any competitive advantage by investing in IT? And here's where I think that we need a more profound distinction between Information and Technology.

"If it can be automated, it will". This is a very real fact. Hence, as technology advances and allows the automatization of more areas of productive work, the adoption of technology will continue.

However, it is in areas where people needs access to information and interacting with other people where the question gets more interesting. Here, IT does not replace; it augments capabilities of workers. In those cases, the secret sauce is in deeper elements. If your business is not easily automatizable, then your competitive advantage will surely rely on innovation: how fast you innovate and how fast you propagate that innovation to your employees and customers. The way you do this is related to the IT you use of course. But it is much more related to the way you structure and use your information.

A good study to be conducted by the Institute for Innovation and Information Productivity would be to compare how different practices on Information Architecture impact corporate productivity. Is there an impact on corporate productivity of the adoption of standard metadata models inside corporations? Can you improve corporate performance by adopting ECM platforms?

OK, let me know if I can help!