Technology enabled business transformation

Technology Enabled Business Transformation
Achieving the Prize

GE started the new millennium as the world's second largest corporation. Yet, at such a pinnacle of success, it issued the following advert.

Destroy the House that Jack Built

"Mr. Welch's biggest fear is that his people do not think hard enough about destroying their business.

Jack Welch has helped make GE the second largest company in the world. Now he needs your help to destroy it. He is hurling his company at the biggest change it has ever seen. Under the heading 'destroyyourbusiness.com' Jack is urging his people to destroy their previous business model or someone else will."

If anyone is unconvinced that the way to stay in business is to destroy it, just look at the 109 companies who left the Fortune 500 during the early part of 2001, or the rate of failure in UK business.

Clearly, change is all around us, and the traditional models of incremental improvement are not sufficiently dramatic to meet its challenge. Instead, the transformation of corporations has become the necessary pill to ensure on-going survival in this ever more competitive jungle. But how?

Technology. Clearly, the answer is to be found in the power of automation. At least if the investment dollars of the world's corporations are the test of where step-change is believed to come from. Ever since SAP launched its revolutionary R/3 package in 1992, the technology revolution has gone from strength to strength. The ERP phenomenon closely followed by CRM and e-business, alongside a host of other supporting technologies such as content management, mobile computing and workflow appears to have changed executives' mindsets around what they are prepared to invest in transformation programs.

The value of technology investment by major corporations has grown exponentially over the past decade - yet many have not seen the returns they had hoped for. This Executive Briefing considers how organizations can make their major transformation assignments deliver.