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The global economic recovery continues but is highly uneven, and prospects for individual companies vary greatly. A key factor that can separate winners from losers in this environment is information technology, says a new report from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

“IT can be a powerful competitive weapon in the current economic and business environment,” said Wolfgang Thiel, global leader of BCG’s Information Technology practice and one of the report’s coauthors. “But it remains largely underutilised. Companies would do well to more actively exploit it. Doing so could be the difference between success and stagnation.”

The report, IT Advantage: Fall 2010, concludes that “the cloud” may indeed transform IT management over the longer term, shifting how corporations consume computing resources, collaborate with outsiders, and create new businesses. But most companies are nowhere near that point.

BCG recommends the use of a “gold standard” for managing IT for business value. The Innovation Value Institute’s recently launched IT Capability Maturity Framework is a state-of-the-art tool designed to help companies optimise their IT capabilities and maximise IT’s delivery of business value.

A streamlined and optimised IT architecture can translate into competitive advantage for insurance companies, notes the BCG report.

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