The Spider’s Strategy: Creating Networks to Avert Crisis, Create Change and Really Get Ahead

Chapter 7. Make Technology Matter

A few years ago, Forrester Research, one of the premier IT analyst firms in the world, hired me to build a strategy consulting practice from scratch. One early client was the CIO of a multibillion-dollar business group of one of the world’s largest companies. She asked me to attend a meeting that her boss, the corporate CIO, had organized for the company’s fifty-odd top IT executives around the world. She wanted me to bring Analyst B, who had recently written a very influential report about the implementation costs of a key corporate software (“Software”).

While preparing for the meeting, I confirmed that B planned to tell the client that it should expect to spend about $2 billion over the next five years adopting ...