Technology Strategy as Rosetta Stone

Abstract

Before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, Egyptian hieroglyphics
were indecipherable. The stone tablet with its message inscribed in three
languages, one of which could be read because it was similar to modern
Greek, enabled classical scholars to break the code and enabled the walls
of the pyramids to again speak.
Immensely detailed, electronically encrypted customer data are the
present business world’s inscrutable writing on the wall. Businesses are
succeeding, to various degrees, in understanding these messages—ac-
cording to how accustomed they are to viewing their core business as
information management. For example, the financial sector has long un-
derstood transactions and dollar movements as bits of information and
its technology strategy has emphasized massively networked process-
ing. As a result, we are used to spending money without ever touching
it. The transition to web-based banking, brokering, and other financial
services has been rapid.
The utility industry has also embraced information technology. But
unlike the financial sector utilities have a huge asset base in production
hardware—generating plant, transmission, and distribution. Technology
strategy has focused on these assets—coordinating them, improving
their reliability and performance. In discharging its responsibility to so-
ciety of maintaining this infrastructure, the utility industry treats energy
as a physical production process and a resulting commodity.