The Strategic Value of ICT for Swedish Business Leadership

Abstract: Information and communication technology already has a long history of influence in basically all areas of an enterprise. In recent years though, a major discussion emerged whether information and communication technologies (ICT) offer an additional strategic value for a business. The different positions maintain reasonable arguments on both sides. One position is that ICT basically has become a commodity, obtainable by everyone. There would be no strategical nor competitive gain, so extra efforts in ICT would be in vain. Another position is that, although, nowadays ICT is easy to acquire, the organisational skills necessary to manage the change and to profit from a good system are a scarce resource and difficult to reproduce. As much as this discussion has been the subject of many academic articles, as little has the research on the views of practitioners emerged. What is their opinion on the strategic relevance of information and communication technology? Do they consider it as merely a necessary commodity, only used to stay competitive, or do they think that there is a competitive advantage to gain in a sophisticated and possibly leading-edge system? Also, a third view is conceivable, in which practitioners regard ICT as just a tool, which serves best by reconsidering the intensity of its use in every new venture. In order to get answers to these questions, semi-structured telephone interviews with leading ICT officers were conducted. The outcome gives a broad overview on what practitioners consider as strategically important in ICT systems and what the current view of the academic guild on this question looks like. An analysis on where, how and why the academic- and the business-views overlap or differ from each other, together with an interpretation of the interview results, concludes the work.