Organizational Responses To Globalization In Some Developing Countries: Interviews With CIOs In Hungary, Romania And South Africa

CIOs in Hungary, Romania, and South Africa (SA) are today overcoming disadvantages that their firms suffered during decades of closed national markets. This paper reports on a series of interviews conducted with CIOs in these developing countries focusing on national and organizational strategies used to prepare for international competition and globalization. They achieved competitiveness by investing in information technologies (IT) that deliver strategic information to their stakeholders. CIOs expressed their views on national economic and market policies as those policies affected their organizations, their markets, and the local economy. Many CIOs remain confident in the general benefits of globalization though some hope for government protection, they nurture local expertise and bestow upon it the best IT they can offer, use IT as a value added component and where their firms use imported technologies they improve on them. Hungarian and Romanian CIOs perceived their organizations were investing more significantly in Internet technologies than South African CIOs, however, that may be a sampling aberration or a cultural bias. Laszlo A. Pook, Mike Hart, Zsuzsanna Szabo