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Business Technology consultants are known for their expertise and many have written articles for a variety of publications. Some of Business Technology’s best thinking appears in McKinsey on Business Technology, a new publication that addresses business strategy and IT issues. Others have been published in McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey and written for top-level executives on current management trends.
Please note: free, one-time registration is required to access articles from The McKinsey Quarterly and McKinsey on Business Technology listed on this page.)
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 | | | Data centers: How to cut carbon emissions and costs | | 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. | Launch this article (PDF - 636 KB) |
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| | | How high-tech companies can overcome complexity in their supply chains | | 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. | | Launch this article (PDF - 264 KB) |
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| | | Where software vendors should focus | | 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. | | Launch this article (PDF - 108 KB) |
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| | | Commentary: Rethinking high-tech distribution | | Winter 2008
David Doctorow, Matthew Lippert, Vats Srivatsan
Companies that make computing, telecom, and networking equipment have in recent years improved their ability to sell directly to customers or to resellers, either online or through their own sales forces. Accordingly, they have worked to become less dependent on their old distribution partners. The new approach works well for selling to big customers in developed economies. But as original-equipment manufacturers look for growth in new markets, they should take a closer look at the value offered by some distributors—particularly those known as two-tier distributors—so named because they buy from manufacturers and sell to resellers. | | Launch this article (PDF - 68 KB) |
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| | | Boosting performance in public-sector IT: An interview with a US Defense Department agency director | | Winter 2008
James Kaplan, Kreg Nichols
Few business challenges approach the scale of managing information at the Department of Defense (DoD)—an organization with gross annual costs of more than $660 billion, dwarfing the world’s largest public companies. As head of the DoD’s Business Transformation Agency (BTA), David Fisher uses his Silicon Valley experience to drive change in the department’s business processes and information systems. The BTA manages several large enterprise resource planning systems across the entire DoD and coordinates integration among the ERP systems of individual organizations, such as the army or navy. | | Launch this article (PDF - 676 KB) |
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| | | Time to rethink offshoring? | | Winter 2008
Ajay K. Goel, Nazgol Moussavi, Vats N. Srivatsan
The production of high-tech goods has moved steadily from the United States to Asia over the past decade. The reasons are familiar: lower wages, a stable global economy, and rapidly growing local markets. These factors combined to make nations such as China and Malaysia favored manufacturing locations. In the past two years, however, the favorable economic winds that carried offshoring forward have turned turbulent. The new conditions are undermining some of the factors that made manufacturers of every stripe, including those in high tech, move production offshore. | | Launch this article (PDF - 228 KB) |
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| | | Eight business technology trends to watch | | McKinsey on Business Technology, Fall 2008
A number of new and emerging technologies—many aimed at enhancing the way the Internet is used—promise to change how companies innovate, managers make decisions, and businesses lower costs, tap talent, or realize new business opportunities.
Although technology always promises benefits, actually gaining them requires a good understanding of its real business implications and of the concomitant managerial changes.
Over the next decade, eight technology-enabled business trends will really matter. Smart managers should start doing their homework now.
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| | | Managing IT to support rapid growth: An interview with the CIO of NetApp | | McKinsey on Business Technology, Fall 2008
As the CIO for a rapidly growing storage vendor, Marina Levinson had to scale the IT organization quickly so that it could handle not only its current tasks but also whatever might be on the horizon.
Keeping systems up and running is just the beginning; the way the IT function uses resources to satisfy the demands of the business determines the real value of information technology. In this interview, Levinson explains how she has organized her team to work closely with the business in order to ensure that IT's investments match the organization’s strategic priorities.
Even in the tech-friendly realm of Silicon Valley, IT leaders struggle to inspire their own people—and the business colleagues who depend on them—to move beyond an order-taking mentality by striving to understand the needs of the business and proposing innovative solutions to its problems.
| | Launch this article (PDF - 373 KB) |
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| | | The next step in open innovation | | McKinsey on Business Technology, Fall 2008
The Internet and new social-networking technologies are allowing companies and their customers to interact with unprecedented levels of richness. Some leading organizations are using this opportunity to draw customers into the heart of the product-development process.
Cocreating products and services with customers, however, is uncertain territory, fraught with challenges and questions—for instance, who owns the resulting intellectual property? Nonetheless, smart companies are now beginning to encourage their customers to help them develop the products and services consumers really want.
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| | | Revolutionizing Data Center Energy Efficiency | | | Global data center capacity is growing rapidly, costing ever more, and emitting more greenhouse gases. This report outlines ways to enhance data center performance through improved efficiency. | Read more |
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| | | Integrating Diverse IT Systems: An Interview with The CIO of Credit Suisse | | McKinsey on Business Technology, Winter 2006
Tom Sanzone, the group CIO of Credit Suisse, says he was attracted to his position by senior management’s commitment to the importance of technology—a commitment demonstrated by his seat on the executive board. In that role, Sanzone helps shape the bank’s overall strategy, which is based on the opportunities his technology organization has created. At the same time, he’s bringing together three formerly independent IT units while keeping them aligned with the goals of their respective businesses: personal banking, investment banking, and asset management. | | Launch this article (PDF - 332 KB) |
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| | | The Overlooked Potential for Outsourcing in Eastern Europe | | McKinsey on Business Technology, Winter 2006
Eastern Europe is a small player in the global market for IT and business process outsourcing, but that’s likely to change as companies in Western Europe become more comfortable with offshoring. Service providers in Eastern Europe offer geographic proximity combined with cultural and language affinities that Western European companies can’t easily find further afield. The region is likely to remain competitive, given its low level of wage inflation (outside of popular centers like Prague and Budapest), along with thousands of qualified graduates entering the marketplace each year. As Eastern European service providers develop their capabilities, they should capture a larger share of the market for IT and business process services. | | Launch this article (PDF - 163 KB) |
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| | | A New Way to Manage IT Demand | | McKinsey on Business Technology, Fall 2006
Companies can get more productivity out of their IT organization by setting up demand organizations that coordinate development requests between the business and the IT supplier. These demand organizations also coordinate requests across business units, avoiding unnecessary duplication and achieving greater economies of scale. Demand organizations should not only manage the suppliers and development projects, but ideally should have control over business processes that are increasingly dependent on IT capabilities. | | Launch this article (PDF - 1.14 MB) |
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