Information Systems: No longer a cost center, but a essential tool for profit maximization.

After a thorough look through many different business IT cases over a two decade period, there is one thing I am sure of - The effective utilization of Information Technology can provide a HUGE competitive advantage.  Companies who neglect their IT resources/department , or treat it as a necessity rather than an asset will fall wayside to their competitors.

I recently got through reading about Harrah's, the nationwide chain of casinos, and how they utilized business intelligence and Information Tech to become a powerful force in their market and realize huge gains. I recommend my readers check this article out, here are a few excerpts:

"To compete on analytics, organizations also need to compete on technology, and that means constantly monitoring cutting-edge IT developments. The key prerequisite is a data-oriented strategy that allows a business to rapidly pull information from every plausible source. These technologies could include enterprise resource planning, CRM, point-of-sale and other transaction technologies. Competing on that information, then, necessitates using an enterprise data warehouse that can store, integrate and present the data in formats that can be easily accessed and analyzed."

"New technologies and data sources that were once just brainstorming ideas are now becoming a reality, much to the advantage of analytical competitors. For example, information content in data warehouses has long been dominated by structured data. But significant progress is being made toward incorporating equal amounts of unstructured data, which includes natural-language data sources such as word processing files, e-mails, text fields from databases and applications, and even voice recognition."

Check out the article here:

http://www.teradata.com/tdmo/v08n02/features/CoverStory/OutSmartTheCompetition.aspx