MIT Sloan Management Review

As managers experience more volatile marketplaces, global competition, shortened product life cycles, customer pressures for tailored offerings and tighter performance standards, they increasingly depend on new information systems.

Expertise alone does not inspire trust and credibility. Successful IT specialists work on their trustworthiness and build good relationships with clients at the same time.

Creating a business-driven IT infrastructure requires that executives thoroughly understand their firm’s strategic context. By formulating a series of business and IT maxims — short simple statements of the business’s positions — managers can identify the IT infrastructure service suited to their company. Organizational, political, cultural, and reward system issues, as well as a lack of IT leadership, may form implementation barriers.

Assessing the value of information technology (IT) has never been easy. Delayed benefits, unintended uses, business changes, and hidden support costs inhibit meaningful evaluation of individual IT investments. This was true when most investments were focused on the support of a single business process or functional area.

When Eastman Kodak turned over the bulk of its IT operations to three outsourcing partners in 1989, outsourcing was a $4 billion a year business.1 Today, that number has grown to nearly $40 billion a year, according to the estimates of industry watchers Frost & Sullivan.

Positioning products in a complex market is one of a company’s hardest decisions. In determining whether to combine or maintain separate product lines, Hewlett-Packard used strategic market modeling (SMM) to design “what if” scenarios and run simulations forecasting market behavior. SMM combines demographics, user needs and competitive-perception data into a database for testing alternative positioning strategies. The author describes SMM’s development and the lessons learned.

ERRORS IN DATA CAN COST A COMPANY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS, ALIENATE CUSTOMERS, AND MAKE IMPLEMENTING NEW STRATEGIES DIFFICULT OR IMPOSSIBLE. The author describes a process AT&T uses to recognize poor data and improve their quality. He proposes a three-step method for identifying data-quality problems, treating data as an asset, and applying quality systems to the processes that create data.