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. Following Kodak’s example, various companies such as Continental Bank, [...]

While outsourcing IT has been a trend in the 1990s, it is not a new phenomenon. For example, systems development has been sourced from outside through application packages or software houses for many years. Large facilities management contracts in the late 1980s signaled a timely convergence of supply and demand factors. On the one hand, [...]

Revolutions, whether the overthrow of governments or breakthroughs in technology, are usually visible. The knowledge revolution, though propelled by the twin engines of computer technology and communication technology, is a revolution of minds and ideas rather than of mass and energy. It is nearly invisible and easy to ignore, particularly by those who stand on [...]

“This is not Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [i.e., the Bell operating companies] here. Rather, it is a market of a thousand niches served by tens of thousands of firms, each offering dozens, if not hundreds, of different products.”— Andrew Campbell, president of Corptech
The information products industry, broadly defined to include products based on [...]

The Internet promises to revolutionize the dynamics of international commerce and, like the telephone and fax machine, may be a major force in the democratization of capitalism. Small companies will be able to compete more easily in the global marketplace, and consumers in emerging markets, in particular, will benefit from the expanded range of products, [...]

In today’s world, business is international. As the global operations of U.S. firms acquire increasing strategic importance, so do the personnel that manage those operations, particularly expatriate managers. Since a growing number of the expatriate managers are women, U.S. firms urgently need to understand the issues surrounding the placement of women in overseas operations.
There are [...]

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.