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Chapter 5 IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies 229

Information technology assessment. Is your firm behind the technology
curve or at the bleeding edge of information technology? Both situations are to
be avoided. It is usually not desirable to spend resources on advanced technolo-
gies that are still experimental, often expensive, and sometimes unreliable. You
want to spend on technologies for which standards have been established and
IT vendors are competing on cost, not design, and where there are multiple
suppliers. However, you do not want to put off investment in new technologies
or allow competitors to develop new business models and capabilities based on
the new technologies.
Competitor firm services. Try to assess what technology services competitors
offer to customers, suppliers, and employees. Establish quantitative and qualita-
tive measures to compare them to those of your firm. If your firm’s service
levels fall short, your company is at a competitive disadvantage. Look for ways
your firm can excel at service levels.
Competitor firm IT infrastructure investments. Benchmark your expendi-
tures for IT infrastructure against your competitors. Many companies are quite
public about their innovative expenditures on IT. If competing firms try to keep
IT expenditures secret, you may be able to find IT investment information in
public companies’ SEC Form 10-K annual reports to the federal government
when those expenditures impact a firm’s financial results.
Your firm does not necessarily need to spend as much as, or more than, your
competitors. Perhaps it has discovered much less-expensive ways of providing
services, and this can lead to a cost advantage. Alternatively, your firm may
be spending far less than competitors and experiencing commensurate poor
performance and losing market share.

LEARNING TRACK MODULES

The following Learning Tracks provide content relevant to topics covered in
this chapter:
1. How Computer Hardware and Software Work
2. Service Level Agreements
3. The Open Source Software Initiative
4. Comparing Stages in IT Infrastructure Evolution
5. Cloud Computing

MIS_13_Ch_05_Global.indd 229 1/17/2013 3:04:30 PM