This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Executives make few moves more critical than their decisions about which technology infrastructure investments will promote future strategic agility. To pinpoint best practices, three IT experts marshaled 10 years of data from 89 leading enterprises. One finding was that when companies describe their IT infrastructure capabilities as services instead of equipment (say, the provision of a fully maintained laptop computer with access to all company systems and the Internet), they do a better job of putting a value on what they are buying. Understanding the 70 IT infrastructure services that emerge consistently from the research can help executives identify which investments will make sense for which strategic business initiative. And understanding whether the contemplated initiative is supply side, internally focused, or demand side can help managers decide whether to make the infrastructure investment on a business unit level or enterprisewide. The authors find that leading companies are making regular, systematic, modular, and targeted IT infrastructure investments on the basis of overall strategic direction. If other companies can learn to recognize which IT infrastructure capabilities are needed for which kinds of initiatives, they can have some assurance that the investments they make today will serve the strategies of tomorrow.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. 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' positions--they can identify the IT infrastructure service suited to their company. The authors' framework has four components: First, consider strategic context. What business demands, roles, and relationships are critical to infrastructure decisions? Second, articulate business maxims. 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. Third, identify IT maxims. From the business maxims, executives identify IT maxims. The maxims specify the role of IT and levels of investment relative to competitors, whether processing is tailored or standardized, and how different types of data are accessed, used, and standardized. Finally, clarify 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, use the infrastructure primarily to reduce costs, make investments primarily to respond to current strategies, or overinvest in IT infrastructure to provide flexibility in responding to long-term goals.