The Shifting Roles of Information Technology in Corporate Organizations.


Yasuhiko Tamura: The Shifting Roles of Information Technology in Corporate Organizations CSIT 2000:1-8

Abstract

Until the 1990?s, information systems used by corporate organizations were focused solely on providing managers with information necessary to put their corporate strategies into practice. Up until that time, IT (information technology) (2) had been considered to be solely a support tool, with no particular applications for implementing advanced strategies. In recent years, however, there have been significant changes in the ways these information systems and IT have come to be viewed. Some progressive managers have started to accept IT as a tool that can affect the boundaries and construction of the market, and be used to review the range of a business and/or any new competition.

The focus of this thesis is not on whether IT is useful for corporate discriminative strategies. Our concerns are rather with how powerful IT can be in handling these strategies, i.e. how IT can contribute to corporate strategic decision-making and how information systems based upon IT can be utilized effectively in strategic situations.

This thesis deals with IT-related problems, dividing them into five different levels depending upon the seriousness of their influence on operations that have been caused by applications of IT(10). These levels indicate the seriousness of IT?s influences on the business rather than the stages of IT evolution. These five levels cannot be applied to each and every organization, but at least one of the five should apply if any of the business operations have anything to do with IT.

The two conclusive points to be obtained from the above analyses are summarized as follows:

Copyright © 2000 by the Institute for Contemporary Education "JurInfoR-MSU". Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the CSIT copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Institute for Contemporary Education JMSUICE. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the JMSUICE.


Printed Edition

Heinz Schweppe and Yuri S. Kabalnov (Eds.): CSIT'2000, Proceedings of 2nd International Workshop on Computer Science and Information Technologies, September 18-23, 2000, Ufa, Russia. USATU Publishers & JurInfoR-MSU Publishing 2000, ISBN 5-86911-312-1

Electronic Edition