Information Technology in Large Corporations: Ten Years of Evolution

摘要: University of California, Irvine www.crito.uci.edu Information Technology in Large Corporations: Ten Years Evolution 1 Ronald V. Ramirez and Nigel Melville Executive Summary . The pace investment (IT) by large corporations remains strong throughout the ten-year period 1987 to 1996. IT is becoming an ever greater share tangible assets, ranging from approximately 2% than 8% This trend even more pronounced recent years, with assets total averaging 46% annual growth compared only 13% for first five years. Despite overall increase stock, trends underlying technologies vary considerably. There a significant toward distributed computing. Personal computers (PCs), high performance work- stations, minicomputers all exhibit over period. number PCs burgeons per every 20 employees roughly 4 Similarly, there six-fold same Concomitant decentralized computing hardware, net-working nodes local area networks experienced rapid during In contrast, while mainframe has increased time period, their numbers have fallen average nearly twelve company less seven Taken together, these are consistent move centralized data centers client/server applications proprietary open systems. variation technology between major sectors economy not uniform. While diffusion slightly manufacturing services, difference among sectors. 1992, services sector averaged 1,000 twice that number. mainframes prevalent though as minicomputers. These differences likely reflect contrasting modes production Several measures useful link financial research been supported grants U.S. National Science Foundation NSF Industry- Cooperative Research Center whose members include: ATL Products, Boeing Company, Canon Systems, IBM Corporation, Nortel, Rockwell Seagate Technologies, Systems Management Specialists, Sun Microsystems. Copyright © 1998 on Organizations (CRITO),