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Core IS Capabilities for Exploiting Information Technology

April 15, 1998 | David F. Feeny , Leslie P. Willcocks | Managing Technology

To achieve lasting competitiveness through IT, according to the authors, companies face three enduring challenges: focusing IS efforts to support business strategies and using IT innovations to develop new, superior strategies; devising and managing effective strategies for the delivery of low-cost, high-quality IS services; and choosing the technical platform on which to mount IS services. Three strands of research -- on the CIO's role and experience, the CIO's capabilities, and IS/IT outsourcing -- demonstrate that businesses need nine core IS capabilities to address these challenges:

1. Leadership. Integrating IS/IT effort with business purpose and activity.

2. Business systems thinking. Envisioning the business process that technology makes possible.

3. Relationship building. Getting the business constructively engaged in IS/IT issues.

4. Architecture planning. Creating the blueprint for a technical platform that responds to current and future business needs.

5. Making technology work. Rapidly achieving technical progress -- by one means or another.

6. Informed buying. Managing the IS/IT sourcing strategy that meets the interests of the business.

7. Contract facilitation. Ensuring the success of existing contracts for IS/IT services.

8. Contract monitoring. Protecting the business's contractual position, current and future.

9. Vendor development. Identifying the potential added value of IS/IT service suppliers.

IS professionals and managers need to demonstrate a changing mix of technical, business, and interpersonal skills. The authors trace the role these skills play in achieving the core IS capabilities and discuss the challenges of adapting core IS capabilities to particular organizational contexts. Their core IS capability model implies migration to a relatively small IS function, staffed by highly able people. To sustain their ability to exploit IT, the authors conclude, organizations must make the design of flexible IS arrangements a high-priority task and take an anticipatory rather than a reactive approach to that task.

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