Remove Cost Center Remove Marketing Remove Strategy Remove Technology
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How to Compete When IT Is Abundant

Harvard Business Review

Carr predicted that an organization''s ability to compete through investing in information technology was about to change dramatically. The IT boom of the 1980s and early ''90s had brought information technology to the corporate masses, unleashing the first full-scale technology revolution in the enterprise. Why is this?

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The Most Successful Brands Focus on Users — Not Buyers

Harvard Business Review

We also supplemented the survey with well-known brand rankings, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and an analysis of their marketing expenditures and strategies. Vail Resorts remade their entire marketing strategy with a program called EpicMix. In many organizations, marketing comes after product development.

Brand 8
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IT Has Finally Cracked the C-Suite

Harvard Business Review

Recently I’ve been having a very hard time talking to students, executives, and business leaders about information technology. In too many companies, IT leaders, relegated to their cost centers, are subordinate to other C-level executives. With the cloud, business units can take responsibility for their own technology.

CIO 9
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There Are 4 Futures for CMOs (Some Better Than Others)

Harvard Business Review

These executives have responsibilities we might expect to reside within marketing. That leaves Chief Marketing Officers with a decision — do you see the rise of these roles as an opportunity or a threat? Marketing faces a particular challenge since customer engagement has traditionally been considered its domain.

CEO 8
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Shadow IT Is Out of the Closet

Harvard Business Review

An impatient marketing or finance manager would, on the sly, secure some extra budget money and hire a contractor to build a little database that tracked mailing addresses or top-line financials. Slowly but surely, as the little database grew bigger and bigger, the manager would wedge the cost into her operating budget.

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Develop Your Company’s Cross-Functional Capabilities

Harvard Business Review

In this excerpt from their new book, Strategy That Works , Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi explain why distinctive capabilities are vital to success, and address a fundamental question that many companies overlook: How to bring these capabilities to scale, so that every part of the enterprise can call on them.

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A Kodak Moment to Reconsider the Value of IT

Harvard Business Review

It helps students see that Kodak did not understand or invest in the digital technologies that were to sweep away its business, a failure usually attributed to incumbent executive myopia. IT was viewed as noncore, a cost to be outsourced like janitorial services and security. So it had no voice.

CIO 9