Information technology support for improving organizational performance in transition economies

The purpose of this research is to investigate the assimilation of IT by a large Romanian manufacturing firm over a seven year period from the change in government in 1989 to 1996. We found that this company could easily acquire modern and up-to-date computer technology and employ highly talented IT personnel. However, the firm experienced difficulties in its attempts to skip learning stages in managing the applications portfolios, integrating subsystems, and understanding business. We concluded that hardware stages could be skipped, i.e., from 1970's mainframes to 1990's IBM A/S400 super-mini computers with relational database technology and local area networking, but that the knowledge base required to develop and implement fully integrated systems must be accumulated and learned over time.