PikeNet Dispatch, July 15, 2003
Vol 8 No. 54 (683), "More than 9,000 subscribers"
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What's Your Competitive Advantage?
 
Process Trumps Technology... " There is less passion and enthusiasm for technology and greater focus on doing more for less." That's Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, writing an internal memo to employees recently (Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2003). This memo followed Nicholas Carr's provocative article in the Harvard Business Review, IT Doesn't Matter (May 1, 2003). Uh-oh. Do you see a trend here?

Yes, budgets are tight in this economic down cycle, and management remembers the enormous capital investment in real estate technology over the last ten years. (RIP: Realcentric, RealtyIQ and Zethus.) But can you imagine communicating without e-mail? Can you imagine doing research without the web? Of course not. With technology, it's not what you have. It's how you use it.

As Nicholas Carr writes in rebuttal to his critics in the June Harvard Business Review, "...the way companies organize processes and use information plays a critical role in their ability to distinguish themselves from competitors." Simply investing in commodity technology items -- like computers, networks and software -- will not generate a competitive advantage.

So what is your competitive advantage? How does your company manage information? What new business process might reshape the delivery of real estate services?

--Peter Pike

Peter Pike / PikeNet Copyright © PikeNet 1996-2005
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