Losing Our Competitive Advantage
The US has led the world in coming up with ways to increase workplace efficiency for a long time, but in 2006, it fell to the rank of 7th. Can anyone say “SOX compliance knocked us out of 1st place in global workplace efficiency?” The World Economic Forum’s annual report on leveraging IT effectively put the US in 7th place. Congressional action to the announcement is to increase funding for research, but as an IT person, I can tell you why we lost and it’s because of SOX compliance. Bill Gates of Microsoft and Craig Barrett of Intel testified before congress that they would like to see increased funding for science and technology education and R&D funding, but neither of those things are going to help the typical public business. Those are pork-barrel funding requests for the companies that manufacture software; the competitive advantage through the use of leveraging IT effectively is in the domain of large software consumers, such as American corporations.