Executive Thought Leadership

The reality today is that the majority of your competition will imitate your successes and implement the same IT applications you do with relatively good efficiency. Over time, your competitive advantage will disappear. This will occur in wave after wave of applications. The key to maintaining your competitive advantage and leadership in your industry is always staying one wave ahead of your competitors.

In this month’s combined June/July issue of the Executive Thought Leadership Quarterly, Dr. Richard Nolan, professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Peter Solvik, senior vice president of Information Services and Chief Information Officer at Cisco Systems, offer their thoughts on how companies can remain at the forefront of new applications to ensure concrete productivity and profitability gains. Both share a belief in the importance of developing a clear Internet strategy that is tightly integrated with the overall business strategy and of building and evolving Internet capabilities through a collaborative effort of senior leaders and partnerships with customers.

Since 1969, Dr. Richard Nolan has studied information technology business transformation, the creative process of discarding industrial economy management principles and evolving a set of workable management principles for the information economy. His latest book is Sense and Respond: Capturing Value in the Network Era.

Pete Solvik joined Cisco Systems in 1993 and is responsible for the company’s worldwide use of IT systems.

Thought Leadership

Pete Solvik has been instrumental in elevating Cisco to become a preeminent Internet-enabled company that sets the standard for business transformation. Read his ideas about what is crucial for a company to consider for the next five years in order to survive in the long term.

Guru Q&A

As a professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Professor Nolan has contributed a number of Harvard Business Review articles on the management of information technology. He is the originator of the 'Stages Theory,' a widely used management framework for information technology base lining and planning.

Cisco: What have you found the productivity benefits to be for companies using the Internet or the network versus those that are not leveraging them?

Nolan: The statistics now indicate that we have obtained a tremendous level of productivity. Organizations are operating at 50 to 60% higher productivity levels by using the Internet. During this period of time many companies have undergone waves of downsizing. But revenue hasn't decreased proportionately. In fact, revenue at many of these companies has continued to climb. So on the macro level there's been a higher level productivity achieved and now it's starting to be reflected more in the statistics.

Read more about Dr. Nolan's stages theory and his overall theories on business transformation.

I hope you enjoy this issue of the Executive Thought Leadership Quarterly .