A recent study by economists at Stanford University and the London School of Economics has an interesting premise: The rise in U.S. productivity in recent years--attributed to the increased use of IT--extends to the foreign subsidiaries of those companies. And, most important, those subsidiaries are more efficient and productive than comparable non-U.S. companies in their markets.
The title of the study is "Americans Do IT Better," but what the authors are really saying is American management culture, based on a largely decentralized structure, increases IT's net effect on productivity.
This premise begs a much larger set of questions as business process management (BPM) and the process-driven enterprise become essential to the intersection of business and IT: If American-run companies are better at using IT, will they also be better at using BPM? And will the BPM movement further the productivity gap between U.S. and non-U.S. companies?
Source: Managing Automation, http://www.managingautomation.com