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Technology is changing the cultural and business landscape beyond recognition. McKinsey Business Technology helps clients harness the transformative power of technology to create business value for today, and step-function growth for tomorrow.
Our consultants are well-rounded business people who have expertise in strategy, operations, and organization as well as technology. It is this combination of a strategic business expertise combined with technological knowledge that makes us uniquely qualified to address technology issues with a CEO perspective.
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| Data centers: How to cut carbon emissions and costs
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Winter 2008
Will Forrest, James Kaplan, Noah Kindler
Every large organization depends on vast arrays of servers to run applications, support electronic communications, and provide productivity tools. Most companies have plans to significantly expand their capacity to meet demand for more new applications and more data. But building and operating the data center facilities required to house these farms consumes ever-larger portions of technology budgets and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. For some information-intensive businesses, data centers represent half of the corporate carbon footprint. As a result, stakeholders and influential pressure groups are taking keen interest in how companies manage their carbon footprints, and adopting best practices will help companies reduce pollution and further improve corporate citizenship.
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| How high-tech companies can overcome complexity in their supply chains
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Winter 2008
Bob Dvorak, Gautam Grover, Vivek Sharma
The supply chains of high-tech companies are globe-spanning marvels, but the complexity of such networks has made it harder to manage end-to-end operations. Many technology companies are grappling with volatility and disruptions across their supply networks, and rooting out waste is an ongoing challenge. As product life cycles shrink, inventories build up in the supply chains of some companies, while others cope with rising distribution costs, on-time delivery problems, or delays in getting new products to market. High-tech companies have let complexity undermine collaboration in their supply chains. The path to improvement lies in better cooperation with suppliers and retailers.
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| Where software vendors should focus
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Winter 2008
Janaki Akella, Nazgol Moussavi
Software-development organizations must be good at many things, but they don't have to be great at everything. In our work with software vendors and with software departments in larger businesses, we have found that they do better when they focus on capabilities that are crucial for their particular products and customers. To help software-development organizations identify where they excel and where they need to improve, we developed a tool kit—using surveys, interviews, postmortem evaluations, and benchmarking efforts—to measure their capabilities in ten critical areas.
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| Using IT to Speed up Clinical Trials
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McKinsey on Business Technology, Spring 2007
The sooner a drug can pass its clinical trials, the bigger are the revenues before its patent expires. The first wave of IT innovations to streamline the clinical-trials process used electronic data capture to speed up the collection and analysis of information. The second wave promises even greater savings if pharmaceutical companies adopt an end-to-end perspective by integrating the planning process for a number of trials and by creating modular, reusable tools to plan them. Pharmaceutical companies should also make electronic data capture easier for research physicians to use, perhaps by creating an industry standard.
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| The CEO as CIO: An Interview with ICICI's Chief Executive
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McKinsey on Business Technology, Spring 2007
India's largest private bank succeeds primarily because it can rapidly implement technologies giving it a competitive edge, says the bank's chief executive, K. V. Kamath. Kamath, CEO of the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India, considers information technology so central to the bank's achievements that he manages it himself, without a CIO. Drawing inspiration from the culture and methodologies of Silicon Valley, Kamath has turned a stodgy industrial lender into a regional powerhouse with assets of $56 billion. Having learned to serve low-income consumers cost-effectively in India, ICICI now is exploring other markets.
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| The Next Frontier in IT Strategy: A McKinsey Survey
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McKinsey on Business Technology, Spring 2007
Senior IT executives say they are well-aligned with their business partners in shaping corporate IT strategy, according to a recent McKinsey survey. Things have changed markedly since a decade ago, when many CIOs merely responded to business information needs. This change shows that IT strategy is maturing from a reactive to a proactive stance. However, IT leaders are less confident that they are driving innovations that lead their companies to new products and processes. Innovation demands a new approach to IT planning.
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