The purpose of this study is to identify the processes for the effective integration of advances in information technology and the strategic management process. As these processes will tend to vary according to industries and organizations, this study investigates the issues involved through the study of diverse case examples of the actual integration of advances in information technology and the strategic management process. The ôMethodologyö section of this chapter identifies the cases analyzed.

Information Technology: Development Over Time

Technology is societyÆs pool of applied knowledge concerning how goods and services can be produced by managers, workers, engineers, scientists, and craftspeople, using land and capital. Innovation, in an economic context, is the introduction of new products, or processes. Productivity is defined as a measure of the rate at which output flows from the use of given amounts of the factors of production (Miller, 1996).

When technology is considered within the context of physical science, it is typically viewed as the

Viewing the development of the Internet as a progression in the development of an information system that began with the linking of North America and Europe with the Atlantic cable in 1858 placed the development of the Internet in a perspective that enables one to speculate on future developments in information systems technology that will render the Internet as obsolete at some future time as the Atlantic cable is obsolete today (Leiner, 2000).

In March 1989, a proposal was made to CERN to make hypertext the foundation of the World Wide Web. In March 1991, a line-mode browser (WWW) was released to a limited group within CERN. The line-mode browser was released to the general public in January 1992 (Leiner, 2000).

The Atlantic cable of 1858 was established to carry instantaneous communications across the ocean for the first time. Although the laying of this first cable was seen as a landmark event in society, it was a technical failure. It only remained in service a few days. Subsequent cables laid in 1866 were completely successful and remained in use for almost 100 years (Leiner, 2000).

The Internet has changed since it came into existence. It was conceived in the era of time-sharing, but has survived into the era of personal computers, client-server, peer-to-peer computing, and the network computer. It was designed before local area networks (LANs) existed, but has accommodated that new network technology, as well as the more recent ATM and frame-switched services. It was envisioned as supporting a range of functions from file sharing and remote login to resou