on and Dacron, Du Pont has recently undergone a radical restructuring in order to meet the demands of foreign competition. Central to that restructuring was a critical analysis of the company's information system management policies and practices. Several problem areas were identified. We will examine these, as well as the solutions undertaken by Du Pont, and those that may be adopted in the future.
When Du Pont entered the global marketplace it was a traditional multinational corporation, with a corporate structure and strategy that supported that approach. A multinational structure is one in which there is a relatively low degree of central control, and a relatively high degree of control among the foreign operators. In the early days of globalization, such an approach was reasonable given the wide diversity of local needs and national interests, and, because of available IT, the inability of the company's information system to integrate and manage them closely.
However, as the global market itself became more tightly integrated and information technology advanced, both the necessity and the possibility of restructuring Du Pont's global strategy became apparent. This, in turn, required a redesigning of its information system. In the 1980s, Du Pont began to understand that deficiencies in its management of information were seriously restricting the company's capacity to compete in a marketplace that had shifted from being multinational to transnational. As we noted earlier, the ability to integrate worldwide systems is vital to global competitiveness, and Du Pont found itself limited by the level of its existing information management system.
The fundamental problems connected with Du Pont's multi-national information system management concerned the areas of product development, marketing approaches, and competitive strategy. Specifically, Du Pont found that its failure to shift with the marketplace to a transnati...