| In today’s digital 21st century, almost all businesses face intense competition from competitors all around the globe. The rapid change of the global environment forces enterprises to seek suitable business strategies to sustain them in the competitive marketplace. This leads enterprises to change their existing ways of conducting and operating businesses, and transform themselves in a way that will enable them to cope with the global challenges, compete globally and eventually grow. The winners in this phenomenon are the companies that implement their business operations in the most creative and innovative manner possible. Needless to say, this is done through the incorporation of information technology (IT) into the business strategies and goals.
In the past few years, IT has been recognized as an imperative factor that drives companies toward global operations (Palvia, Palvia, & Whitworth, 2002). Moreover former U.S. President Bill Clinton (2002) also stated in his address at the University of California, Berkeley: “A world characterized not just by a global economy, but by a global information society. When I took the oath of office as president on January the 20th, 1993, there were only 50 sites on the World Wide Web in ’93. When I left office, there were over 350 million and rising. Today they’re probably somewhere around 500 million. There’s never been anything like it.” It has evidently indicated that the globalization process will not thrive without judicious exploitation of information technology. Consequently the key words that emerge in performing innovative business operations are “globalization” and “information technology.”
Globalization is not merely conducting businesses outside of home regions or countries. It involves the coordination of business structure, functions, activities, units, and employees together with the incorporation of appropriate global strategies. In order to implement the global strategy, efficient operation and management of global information systems seem to be the imperative success factor. |
