You'd better get ready for infrastructure integration. Fast.
That was the message from an informal poll of business leaders at the San Antonio World Congress of the International Development Research Council (see accompanying feature), the world's preeminent corporate real estate association. The interactive poll was conducted during a packed luncheon at the IDRC conference, which drew 2,500 attendees to the south Texas river city.
After the poll, even IDRC Director of Global Research Robert Materna said, "I'm astounded by the uptake in this market for corporate infrastructure resource management." Judging from the poll, the trend to integrate key corporate support functions is acting like a runaway freight train, accelerating full-throttle at an exponential clip.
For example, 63 percent of poll respondents said their companies have "already begun to integrate . . . corporate infrastructure." And an even more striking 75 percent of executives agreed that "over the next two years the need for integration among human resources, information technology and real estate will increase."
But the most compelling evidence of the burgeoning trend came in the poll's results on corporate competitiveness: 83 percent of the San Antonio audience said that the melding of internal corporate functions would make their companies "more competitive."
"Companies clearly see infrastructure integration as a hidden source of competitive advantage," Materna said. "The poll reinforces what C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel said in Competing for the Future: 'All core competencies are sources of competitive advantage, but not all competitive advantages are core competencies.' Too much corporate infrastructure can hinder competitiveness; too little can mean not being able to support core needs."
Infrastructure integration is also playing a substantial role in today's wave of mergers and acquisitions, Materna added.
"Case after case [shows] merged enterprises [that] have failed due to insufficient or incompatible infrastructures," he explained.
"Conversely, well-established and complementary infrastructures can significantly reduce the risk of a failed merger."
IDRC is releasing a research report analyzing the San Antonio poll results. (For details, access: www.sitenet.com/idrcnet)
-- Jack Lyne
