MIT Sloan Management Review

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.

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.