- Know where you are. The enterprise needs to understand where it is in the development of its administrative structure across the range from domestic to exporter to multi-domestic to transnational to global.
- Develop IT support functions in local markets. This helps to create competitive advantage by enabling key systems to be rapidly deployed into overseas markets.
- Identify the IT-based advantages that are specific to your company. Find points of strength in your operating IT environment that can be used in a foreign market to gain rapid market share.
- Search for synergy. When working with joint ventures or acquisitions, focus on collaborative and knowledge-sharing systems as a “slow build” strategy for further integration.
- Search for transparency. Work to enable transparency in your systems so that your partners can “look into” your processes – or even through your processes into your industrial value network.
- Harvest the fruits of information integration. Pick applications portfolios nationally, but move control, design, support and hosting of major databases to a central “global” location.
- Become both global and local. Reflecting the overarching need to be both globally coherent and locally adaptive, a multinational company’s information technology setup has to be both global and local. Adopt a “Lego-type” flexibility for systems and applications, and for IT support. Data must be standardized to be useable and useful. Interfaces need to be clear and unambiguous if different internal units and external parties are to be made a part of the overall architecture.
- Build a collaborative backbone. Typically, the flexibility required by global systems is complemented by a robust and seamless system for messaging, reporting, logistics, and the like. There is a definite need for a “backbone” set of technologies and applications that keep the company integrated and to support any attempt at a global strategy.
For more information contact Shaun
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