For many years it has been common for business leaders to say that people are their most important asset. Now, however, it seems that chief executives think that technology is a more important determinant of future organisational success than people skills, according to an international survey of 1,709 CEOs conducted by IBM. Technology skills was the highest ranked external determinant of success, ahead of people skills (69%) and market factors (68%).
But are technology skills really so important? In most industries, an innovative firm might gain an advantage by adopting a new technology, but the other firms soon adopt the same technology, erasing the first firm’s advantage. Unless a new form of technology can be protected by a patent or similar barrier to copying, it is very difficult to maintain a significant competitive advantage based solely on technology.
The buzz at the moment is social networking. If you company is not actively getting into Facebook, you’re going to miss out – or so the story goes. However, there seem to be very few companies that have worked out a way of getting value out of a significant Facebook investment. Plenty of companies that have not invested in any type of social networking have still not lost any business as a result. The path to future success is a bit more complicated than simply adopting the latest technologies.