Multinational corporations - the emerging research agenda

Since the bulk of management information systems (MIS) research in the past has been ‘domestic’ in nature, it has failed to grasp the strategic challenges posed by information systems found in multinational corporations. As they usually involve hundreds of data centers, their scale is much larger than the size of systems normally studied. Theories developed in international business can be useful in providing categorizations for analysis. These include headquarters-subsidiary coordination, corporate intelligence systems, internalization, firm-specific advantages, and host-country/MNC relations. As each area is integrated with MIS research, it raises a series of questions involving technology, systems development, human resources and computing economies.