Competitive Information Systems in Support of Pricing

Recent highly publicized success stories have focused general managers' attention on so called "competitive information systems." But organizations attempting to identify systems that provide competitive advantage are finding the search to be frustrating and often unrewarding. This article combines two familiar information systems concepts, the Anthony framework and information attributes, to produce a methodology for identifying one class of competitive information systems, systems in support of product pricing. A number of examples demonstrate the descriptive utility of the classification scheme, and provide a synergistic vehicle for the discovery of new applications.