`Betting the business´: strategic programs to rebuild core information systems

Senior executives´ efforts to rebuild the information systems that support their core business are discussed. It is reported that they find such programs are high risk, because they require huge investments, provide the operational foundation for competitive differentiation, and lock the company into particular ways of doing business. A principal difficulty is that core architectural reconfigurations are very different from ordinary application development programs. Reconfiguration efforts depend on matching strategic assumptions with systems potential, a task that resists conventional methods for translating user requirements into screens, functions, and data structures. It is concluded that knowledge of the firm´s business is even more critical to the success of reconfiguration efforts than conventional application development projects, for the effort must be tightly tied to the firm´s business strategy