“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”
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.
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