IT for Competitive Differentiation

Following up on my recent post on the impact of IT for market change and differentiation, I say this article from HBS Professor Andrew McAfee.  He makes a nice analogy about how competitors can buy the same conversion technology (for raw materials or digital information) and create completely different outputs.  It all depends on how they want to apply it.  How they want to create competitive differentiation.

IT is just a digital process factory.  

That's an interesting way to think about it.  I'll have to wrap my head around the concept, especially as we have both OpsMgm't and ITMgm't courses this semester.  Academia often tries to keep topics in silos, but in this case, it'll be very interesting to see how they merge and intersect.