All right, so let’s bring that back and talk about what does this mean, as far as IT mattering or not. What are our opportunities to get some advantage, to get ahead from these different tools that we have? With function IT, this is actually where I think that that argument—IT doesn’t matter—might be closest to correct. For example, I’ve got access to unbelievably good statistical software. All of my academic colleagues have access to the exact same software. Is that stuff helping HBS get ahead of Wharton and Chicago and Stanford? It’s impossible for me to believe that. We can all just buy these tools. Does it help an organization like BMW get a little farther ahead? Maybe. Does it help Ducati get ahead? No. They very explicitly told me, “We have to have these tools. We could not have built the bike in a year without them.” But we know Honda’s got them, we know Yamaha has them. They're a ticket to entry in this competitive battle, but no one is getting ahead of anyone else. Network IT. I think this is a fascinating open question. I don’t know the answer to this. It seems like it’s another case of IT doesn’t matter, because these are open-source products in a lot of cases. These are free. Can anyone get ahead of anyone else? Maybe they can, because what I saw with the Wikipedia is how important it is for someone overseeing that project to set the norms, and set the culture, and start this ball rolling in a productive way because very often they can go on in unproductive ways. And I think in organizations that don’t spend some time on this, we might see these new tools going the way of the old knowledge management tools, which got bought and then sat there and got dusty on a shelf somewhere for a while. I don’t know how big an impact these are going to have on competition. Are they going to change the way we’re doing business? Clearly. And not just for media companies and not just for the music companies. The conversations going on are proliferating and they really are touching more and more parts of the economy. Enterprise IT. I’ve seen companies stumble so badly. I’ve seen them succeed brilliantly with this stuff. These tools are great ways, in my opinion, to go pursue competitive advantage, to try to get ahead. Because if you have a bright idea about a business process that will really work, these things let you define it, bake it into software, deploy it throughout an organization, and then scale that organization like crazy just by deploying it over and over managerial toolkit. These very scalable industrial-strength technologies, these things are about ten years old overall. And they're only getting better over time. So the tools that we have to define and deploy a set of operating procedures or ways of doing business have really come online quite recently. And we’re seeing examples of companies who use them very well, versus ones who are falling apart or winding up like Hershey’s when they try to do it. Where Does IT Advantage Come from? So let me give you a couple of examples of where I have seen companies grab some IT
advantage. And the reason that I say this is a managerial phenomenon, and not an entrepreneur phenomenon, not a technologist’s phenomenon, and not a CIO phenomenon— this is a managerial phenomenon because, over and over, I’ve seen managers sense an opportunity to use technology in a very interesting way. And the people that I’ve written cases about tend not to be geeks, they tend not to be vendors, and they tend not to be CIOs. They tend to be a manager who looks around at their organization and says, “Man, there’s a better answer out here.”