 Mr. Dave Aaron we welcome you to the briefing on IT, winning IT strategies by Gartner and ISD Qatar and we really want to thank you for your time and first thing we'd like to ask you about how do you do you view ICT? Is it a source of competitive advantages for businesses or is it just an enabler or facilitator? That's a great question. I think that the problem is in the past everyone's looked at all of IT together but in fact in every business some parts of IT are commodities just an enabler and some can be true sources of competitive advantage. For example a lot of companies are using collaboration techniques now to gain some advantage in their management style and management culture. So how do you view organization and investment on IT? How should it be? Well I think the main thing is just like any other investment IT intensive projects and programs should be viewed in terms of business value. It should be managed in terms of business value from cradle to grave all the way from planning through to implementation and benefits realization. It should use the same model of value including financial, strategic and risk mitigation value. So there in one of a very famous and argumentative articles about IT ICT Nicholas Carr mentioned in his article ICT doesn't matter that sometimes ICT can be viewed as a infrastructural technology as opposed to a proprietary technology that can lend itself into some exclusive advantages for business. So what do you think ICT fits into? Is it a proprietary or an infrastructure technology for most cases for most businesses? In all businesses some aspects of IT are infrastructural. There are very few companies who would claim that their email system really is a competitive advantage for them but in all businesses some aspects of ICT can be used to drive their competitive success. The problem is it depends on a deep understanding of their business model and how they will win as a business. So for example if they win through a deeper more intimate relationship with their customers often types of business intelligence can be used to really drive their advantage in their knowledge and understanding of the business. If their advantage is through a low cost high availability B2C product for example then often there is advantage in their supply chain technologies. But the issue is it's not the same for every company. So IT has a competitive advantage not so much as IT embedded in a business system. So mentioning value chains what role can ICT play in value chain? Is it just operating the value chain or is it adding real value to it? Well a couple of things I think it can make the whole value chain or parts of the value chain internal and external more efficient. It can also change the way companies interact with others in the value chain or maybe people might say the value ecosystem. So IT can also change how and where you partner in the ecosystem what you outsource, what you insource, both business processes and IT, how you connect, how easily you can change connections with different partners. So I think IT works both in the value chain and works on the value chain changing the value chain. How can an organization evaluate its IT investment or IT expenditure? So let's say they spent a certain sum of money on IT. Is IT success measurable or not? And how can an organization measure the success? Well in terms of success one should measure business value generated whatever the vernacular is for that in the company whether it's free cash flow, economic value add, net present value. So first of all I think you should measure IT's success like any other investment in terms of value added. In terms of evaluating how much is spent on IT, the cost of IT, I think it's very important not to look at IT as a whole but to separate IT into run the business IT, grow the business IT and transform the business IT because they are managed differently. Run the business IT should be managed for cost and quality but grow and transform the business IT is a strategic business decision. So looking at IT cost as a whole I think can be a mistake but splitting out run, grow and transform the business IT can be very helpful. You spoke of three value disciplines today which is customer intimacy, operation excellence and product leadership. So can you highlight each of the three and explain how do they add value? Well it was the observation of some some research as a number of years ago Tracy and Weasmer that companies that win choose to focus on one of those three areas either continuously creating innovative products and services. You know we might think of the iPhone or some some early Nokia phones etc as an example of product and service innovation. So winning business by having exciting compelling products and services. Second is operational excellence, managing by having very low costs, very high availability, very little inventory in the supply chain, allowing you more flexibility in lower pricing than your competitors and higher availability. The third customer intimacy, managing the whole customer experience so that the customer is more intimately connected to you as an organization and those in turn are great ways of thinking of the question why will our customer buy from us and then how can IT help that position? Okay so some argue that instead of building a strategy for a business and then trying to find the ICT resources that would fit or to would lead to achieving the strategy some argue that it should be backward it should be finding the ICT resources that are available to you or you can acquire them and then build a strategy that can fit with the capabilities of the resources you have. So what do you think should the strategy come first or the ICT investment come first? Well in an ideal world we would talk about an outside in IT strategy. You start with the demand what business are we in? Where do we play as a business and how will we win and then translate that through to what IT resources and other resources do we need to apply to support that position? In reality sometimes some resources are scarce, some kinds of talent, some kinds of skill, some kinds of money is scarce so I think it's a combination of this outside in picture how do we win and how should IT be used to support that position and also a recognition of the reality of maybe the legacy systems and processes we have the talent available to us. So mainly outside in but with some practical supply side considerations. Okay so finally how do you think ICT can be helpful for SMEs as opposed to larger organizations that may have more resources and more even human resources and capital so how do you think ICT can be helpful for SMEs? Well first of all I think SMEs as you say have limited resources to compete against larger organizations number one that means they need to be more strategic not less. Quite often SMEs are less disciplined about strategy and more tactical running around but actually the imperative is for SMEs to do less better stuff not more stuff so that's the first thing discipline on strategy which is not common in SMEs. The second specifically is agility we think SMEs their advantage often comes from being more agile than larger competitors that could be financial agility, operational agility, technical agility, scalability in the infrastructure but if possible SMEs should try to work out what it means for them to be agile for example agility means being very flexible where you need to be but where you don't need to be driving out the flexibility being very standardized centralised simple