Information-Enabled Organization Transformation and Outsourcing

Firms are in the midst of an IT-driven revolution in corporate infrastructure. As illustrated by the Frito-Lay case, the technologies have enabled redistribution/redefinition of authority and decision making, delayering, installation of new control tools, significant time compression, cost reduction, enhanced quality, ability to handle managed complexity and flexibility. Those benefits often evolve over long spans and engender such massive resistance because of their disturbance of existing corporate culture, that disappointing results are being achieved in up to 70% of the cases. At the same time many corporations have lost confidence in their IT unit as the most efficient way to deliver these results and are looking to outsourcing part or all of the IT unit.