MIT Sloan Management Review

The potential for new information technologies such as broadband networks, mobile communications and the Internet to transform businesses often goes unrealized because companies have no clear guidelines on when and how to best employ them. To help managers make that determination, the authors identify 10 specific drivers on the basis of their research at 20 large North American and European companies, including easyJet, Toys ‘R‘ Us and Eastman Chemical Co.

If they wish to achieve profitable, sustainable growth, suppliers seeking a larger share of their customers‘ wallets need a fine-grained, disciplined approach to getting, leveraging and documenting customer knowledge. Best-practice suppliers such as Bank of America Corp., SEGHERS, Technische Unie, KLM Cargo and Telindus follow a strategy predicated on rigorously estimating the current share of each customer‘s business, selecting and pursuing appropriate opportunities to increase that share, and carefully documenting the profitability of the efforts.

The business story of the 1980s and ’90s was, in large measure, the story of commoditization. Globally, in one market after another, companies large and small learned techniques for producing high-quality goods and services at competitive prices, and found they could compete with the most powerful and seemingly entrenched incumbents. Companies that successfully emerged from [...]

Using the Internet as a platform for customer collaboration on innovation has its limitations. Thus, companies need to complement this through process of indirect, or mediated, innovation known as innomediation and through third-party actors at the center of this process, known as innomediaries. The authors identify three distinct types of innomediary, observe how each one can help acquire different forms of customer knowledge, and suggest how companies exploit the power of these emerging intermediaries.

Often, process-enabling information technology fails to dramatically improve corporate performance. The fundamental problem, the author says, is that implementing managers usually follow what amounts to a universal checklist, leaving the executive in charge to wonder which findings apply, under what circumstances and why. This article offers a synthesis that can aid in implementation, highlighting how big IT implementations differ and how managers should handle the differences.

The authors find that leading companies are making regular, systematic, modular and targeted IT-infrastructure investments on the basis of overall strategic direction. To pinpoint best practices, they marshaled 10 years of data from 89 leading enterprises. Understanding the 70 IT-infrastructure services that emerge consistently from the research can help executives identify which investments will make sense for which strategic business initiative.

The authors‘ work with 500 executives reveals that few managers believe their information infrastructure is able to handle the pressures from deregulation, globalization, ubiquitous connectivity and the convergence of industries and technologies. To encourage senior managers and IT managers to use information systems in ways that facilitate strategic change, the authors create an applications-portfolio scorecard, which helps managers assess information infrastructure on the basis of six key considerations before making investments.

As networks become very large, they can fall prey to saturation, cacophony, contamination, clustering and high search costs. Those phenomena mean that larger networks can, in some cases, have less value than smaller ones. The authors have identified several strategies that network builders can employ to maintain network effects or limit their decline.

The idea that e-commerce would lead to disintermediation has turned out to be largely wrong. The Web transforms but does not eliminate the advantages of the middleman‘s central lookout position. The authors show how new kinds of intermediaries are helping smart companies realize the promise of the Web. They offer nine ways that intermediaries traditionally add value and explain that three will change, three will survive in a new form, and three present growth opportunities.

OPINION: The proliferation of sanctioned information intermediaries will increase the productivity of interorganizational tasks and processes and spur the next surge in global growth.