It's the money that's already at work. There's a ton of it, and there will be a ton more of it. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School strategy guru, argues that business strategy is made more important by Internet technologies. It shifts power to customers, who use Internet-enabled reverse auctions and aggregation to negotiate prices down. That's why it's so important to have a strategy that anticipates the impact of these technologies on the marketplace and on the competition.
Information technology is the central nervous system of strategy.
No matter what business you are in, information technology is now a core function. If you look at the IT systems at leading companies around the world, they read like a map of past priorities. Ten years ago, finance had juice, so it got its system. Five years ago, marketing was riding high, so it got its system. Then manufacturing muscled in and got its system.