Retail Insights ‐ Winter 1997

Prioritizing should be a company’s No. 1 virtue. In the absence of priority, companies flounder, and employees become distracted. This inevitably leads to missed deadlines, over‐extended budgets, and a resulting output different from what was originally intended. This is excruciatingly evident when implementing an information technology (IT) strategy. Few industries can compete with the heap of wasteful, incomplete, and underutilized projects IT has amassed over the past two decades. The core of the problem is not the technology, but a failure clearly to define priorities at all levels in a company.