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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 -- they can identify the IT infrastructure service suited to their company. The authors' framework has four components: 1. Considering strategic context. What business demands, roles, and relationships are critical to infrastructure decisions? Keeping in mind the firm's strategic intent, business units may be able to coordinate and leverage some approaches across units, while keeping some autonomous and local. 2. Articulating business maxims. Using insight gained from examining the strategic context, both business and IT managers formulate business maxims and articulate agreed-on positions that they can readily understand and act on. The maxims should focus employees' attention on the firm's competitive stance, the extent of coordination across units, and the implications for information and IT management. 3. Identifying IT maxims. From the business maxims, executives identify IT maxims that describe how the firm must lead or follow in the deployment of IT in its industry, electronically process transactions, and share data across the firm and with other strategically allied companies. The maxims specify the role of IT and levels of investment relative to competitors, whether processing is tailored or standardized, and how different types of data are accessed, used, and standardized. 4. Clarifying a firm's view of IT infrastructure. A company should determine how it sees infrastructure from among four views: none, utility, dependent, and enabling. It can forgo synergies among units and not invest in infrastructure services. It can take a utility view and use the infrastructure primarily to reduce costs. With a dependent perspective, it can make investments primarily to respond to current strategies. With an enabling view, the company can overinvest in IT infrastructure to provide flexibility in responding to long-term goals. According to Broadbent and Weill, some companies may be prevented from developing clear maxims by two barriers -- expression and implementation. Managers may not understand the firm's strategic intent, executives may not have communicated strategy to operational managers, and the firm's culture may deter use of maxims. Organizational, political, cultural, and reward system issues, as well as a lack of IT leadership, may form implementation barriers.

Most of the existing frameworks for strategic management assume an environment that is stable and simple. But technological advances and global changes have created dynamic, complex climates in which companies must operate. Chakravarthy examines the industry he calls Infocom & #8212; information providers, information processors, communication providers, and communication support. Technology has lowered many entry and mobility barriers among the industries; Microsoft is an example of a company that has exploited many strategic opportunities now available to Infocom companies. Chakravarthy compares and contrasts the popular frameworks for formulating competitive strategy. Porter’s framework assumes stable competitors, suppliers, and buyers. The company finds an appropriate strategy and erects the necessary barriers. But, says the author, technological change quickly makes the barriers obsolete, Infocom players have deep pockets, and government policy has a diminishing role. In the Hamel and Prahalad approach, the role of strategy is not to accommodate an existing industry structure but to change it. However, the author comments, Infocom is not evolving predictably, so benchmarking against its current structure is futile. The D’Aveni framework assumes that strategy must continually seek to change the rules of the game because companies will quickly retaliate against any new strategy. Chakravarthy points out that a firm cannot continuously move from one advantage to another. His proposed framework, applied to the Infocom industries, has three elements: Reconceptualizing strategy. Companies must repeat innovation; e.g., Canon’s successful launch of inkjet printers damaged its position in laser printers but was necessary to respond to competition. Companies must build customer networks around products or services. They must also be able to sense market flow, as Microsoft did when it found that its proprietary strategy for Microsoft Network would isolate it from the Internet. Sharing responsibility for strategy broadly within the firm. Employees must share a vision that is purposely vague but describes the firm’s guiding philosophy. Strategy must come from the bottom up and from small, focused units. Focusing on organization capabilities as the source of competitive advantage. Companies must leverage, strengthen, and diversify their competencies. In the end, according to Chakravarthy, “going with the flow” may be the best strategy for a firm in a turbulent environment. Rigid top-down strategies may be counterproductive. Firms should concentrate instead on growing distinctive competencies for the future.

Why are new products frequently canceled in midstream or introduced later than planned? Why do product developers often have no time to devote to “top priority” projects? Companies may not be integrating strategic, conceptual, and planning functions at the front end with the detailed design and development that follows. Khurana and Rosenthal isolated seven activities critical to product and project success. The foundation elements, those that require cross-functional effort and senior management support, include developing a clear product strategy, formulating a product portfolio, establishing a structure that facilitates product development, and sharing responsibilities throughout the organization. Project-specific elements, which focus on the individual project, include clarifying the product concept, defining the product and market requirements, and planning and estimating the project’s resource requirements. The authors point out that the interrelationships between the elements are as important as the elements themselves. Khurana and Rosenthal examine in detail how the eleven companies in their study implemented the seven activities. While the authors rated two companies as outstanding and two as satisfactory, they considered seven to have serious deficiencies in their development of product strategies. Some had product development teams and managers but no one in charge of formulating product strategy. Others made decisions on new product development based on project criteria rather than strategic fit. And others had an isolated R&;D department that funded projects based on technology rather than on their potential to satisfy product requirements. How can a company improve its front-end process? Khurana and Rosenthal offer a checklist and map for diagnosing a company’s integration of front-end activities. And they discuss how a company can make the transition to a better managed product development process.

While few of us can miss the evidence of company sponsorship at sports events like the Olympics or World Cup Soccer, how many can recognize which were the legitimate sponsors and which were competitors "ambushing" the effectiveness of the sponsor's message? Meenaghan traces the recent growth in corporate sponsorship of various sporting events as a marketing tool and elaborates on some of the complexities of gaining sponsorship rights. He reflects on some of the benefits that accrue to the sponsor, such as audience perceptions of patriotism, adventure, and quality. Those benefits may be diluted, however, by ambush marketers that associate with major events without securing rights. For example, in the 1984 Olympics, Fuji was the worldwide sponsor, but Kodak became a sponsor of the ABC television broadcasts and the official film of the U.S. track team, thereby directing attention away from Fuji. Other examples abound, as ambushers create confusion in consumers' minds about who the "official" sponsor really is. Meenaghan addresses the legality and ethics of ambushing. Frequently, ambushers do nothing illegal and do not use official logos or trademarks, but merely imply association with an event. Sponsors' only recourse may be to purchase all the rights to an event, including broadcast rights. Ethical issues are harder to define; does using an image of downhill skiing, for instance, imply sponsorship of the Winter Olympics? Meenaghan offers strategies for protecting against ambushers, particularly on the part of event owners. The International Olympic Committee's anti-ambush program protects all emblems, marks, and symbols and enjoins any city sponsoring the event to protect those symbols as well. In the end, awareness of the possibilities of ambushing is probably the sponsor's best protection.

In an overview of the future role of the IT organization, the authors examine the business and technological changes that are effecting change in many IT units. There are four major process changes in the way firms operate -- reengineering operational processes, reengineering support processes, rethinking managerial information flows, and redesigning network processes -- that all have a major impact on the IT unit. A distributed computing environment, new development software methods, capabilities like the Internet and other networks, new entrants in the computer industry, and outsourcing are the technological changes affecting the IT organization. The authors cite eight imperatives in which IT organizations must excel in order to succeed: -- Achieve two-way strategic alignment. Management and IT must work together to ensure that their initiatives are aligned. -- Develop effective relationships with line management. Communication between IT and line personnel will ensure integration of business and technology capabilities. -- Deliver and implement new systems. Systems delivery will include not only development but also procurement and integration. -- Build and manage infrastructure. IT units must develop an architecture, establish standards, communicate the value of the infrastructure, and operate the increasingly complex infrastructure. -- Reskill the IT organization. New skills -- not just technical skills but business skills -- will be needed. -- Manage vendor partnerships. IT managers must be informed buyers and negotiators. -- Build high performance. The IT unit must meet increasingly demanding performance goals. -- Redesign and manage the federal IT organization. Firms must establish the placement of IT decision-making power and the distribution of managerial responsibilities. Rockart et al. also examine the new role of IT management in ensuring that all line managers understand the potential of IT and how to use it effectively and that business strategies are effectively implemented. Success is dependent on line managers' response in planning and implementing new IT-based processes.

Widespread pricing mismanagement plagues service industries because too many services marketers ignore the special challenges of pricing intangible products. The authors discuss the implications of this kind of pricing in today's highly competitive conditions and offer a framework that reconciles the implications with customers' quest for value. Three distinct but related strategies for services pricing -- satisfaction-based pricing, relationship pricing, and efficiency pricing -- can help services marketers capture and communicate value through their pricing.

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.

Choosing the right strategy for negotiations with someone from another culture is a difficult task for which managers have few established guidelines. Implementing that strategy well can often be even more challenging. Whether you know a little or a lot about your counterpart's culture -- whether you are a novice or experienced negotiator -- you will find useful advice in this article on effectively choosing and implementing a culturally responsive strategy. Part 1, published in the Winter 1994 issue, presented eight culturally responsive strategies in a framework based on their feasibility.

Many business analysts have attributed the loss of U.S. market share in the semiconductor industry to unfair Japanese practices, including trade barriers and "dumping" of goods in export markets. Egelhoff draws from a study of sample semiconductor firms to argue that the market share losses have also been influenced by the distinctly different competitive modes that U.S. and Japanese firms use. U.S. firms tend to compete by developing a unique business strategy; Japanese firms tend to compete by implementing not-so-unique strategies better than anyone else. He shows how these two competitive styles have implications for a range of business activities and for other global industries as well.

In 1982, Robert Benjamin published a forecast of the state of information technology in the year 1990. He wrote that the information systems environment was in a considerable state of "flux" and information systems managers could benefit from a prediction of the "endpoint scenario [in order to] focus major planning strategies." Ten years later, it's time to provide a new set of landmarks for another decade of flux. Benjamin and his coauthor, Jon Blunt, envision the information technology world of 2000. What can we expect? What should we not expect? And what can we not even begin to guess?