IT strategy: why is it important in consultancy?
Mohamed Hédi Charki is a Professor of Information Systems at EDHEC Business School. He teaches IT Strategy to MSc in Strategy, Organisation & Consulting students. His research expertise involves social media networks and their ability to impact employee creativity and well-being at work. Prof. Charki tells us all about his course and the skills that students will gain.
Why is IT strategy important in consultancy?
Clients expect their consultants to come up with creative solutions to their business problems. These days, any solution, no matter how creative, will integrate a technological aspect so that it will be implemented and pay off. Therefore, MSc SOC students need to be aware of the key technological challenges associated with the solutions they want to propose to their customers.
What class do you teach?
I teach IT Strategy to MSc Strategy, Organisation & Consulting students. In the spring of 2023, it will be the tenth anniversary of the course.
What can you tell us about your field of expertise?
My field of expertise revolves around the use of information systems to drive organisational and personal performance. In the IT strategy course, my students learn key approaches that help them to understand, use and leverage information technology to drive performance.
Your latest research is about the Millefeuille theory. Can you explain the concept?
The core idea of the Millefeuille theory is that, as organisations implement new technologies, they do not consider the degree to which these technologies will replace, overlap or extend the use of existing technologies. Many decades ago, companies proposed the idea of email to their employees. Then came the intranet. More recently, organizations have embraced the technology of enterprise social media, such as Workplace by Facebook, Slack or Teams. In general, organisations often neglect to explain to their employees how they should navigate productively the use of these different technologies. All of them are superimposed. This is why it is called the Millefeuille theory (after the multitudinous layers in puff pastry in French).
If companies do not explain how these different technologies can complement each other, they may end up with counterproductive effects, such as redundancy, by duplicating the same content on different channels. You also run the risk of technology overload. For example, you may end up with an overflowing inbox, because you receive an email notification every time a colleague posts a message or likes a post you published on Slack or Teams. The notifications may distract or confuse employees and decrease their productivity. In a nutshell, this is what the Millefeuille theory is about: how different technologies can be superimposed on each other and how companies manage the process to avoid counterproductive effects from their use.
What are the key concepts the students will learn in your class?
In the IT Strategy class, my students will learn several skills. I will share a couple of them with you. First, in businesses that are highly competitive, organizations must accelerate their time to market. By time to market, I mean the time between business idea generation and the actual capacity of an organization to transform that idea into a concrete product or service for its customers. My students learn the techniques associated with using machine learning to transform the software life development cycle in organizations. Second, my students also learn how to use extended SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and analytics to make agile decisions in complex and rapidly changing business situations. This is an amazing moment in the IT Strategy course, as my students use the skills they have acquired in different domains, such as finance, marketing, and operations, to make decisions as they use extended SAP ERP systems.
Will they have the opportunity to apply the theory?
Yes, absolutely. We use case studies that are oriented toward solving concrete business problems by leveraging information technology.
Which are the key skills the students will gain in your class? How will it help them in their future careers?
Many students consider technology to be a black box that is the onus of engineers. However, when they are invited to think up creative solutions for their customers, they are going to interact with their customers’ IT representatives, who have their own IT situations. Thus, our students need to be aware of the key technological challenges so that they can suggest solutions that are smart and creative but also implementable.
Which tools will our students learn to master?
Our students will learn to master extended SAP ERP systems and integrated data analytics tools.
What do you expect them to have mastered on completion of your course?
Technology is the number one investment in organisations. One-third of corporate expenditures go on information technology (software, hardware, networks, social media, etc). So, IT strategy is tremendously important. I expected my students to be able to integrate the IT implications of the creative solutions they suggest to their customers. This means that my students will be able to take into account things such as IT risk, the development of machine learning-based applications, and the migration to enterprise systems.
