Sustaining Competitive Advantage through a Value Net: The Case of Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Information technology (IT) has long been seen as possessing an inherent potential to facilitate sustained competitive advantage, i.e., value-creating strategies that are difficult for others to imitate. But successfully fashioning and executing long-lived IT-enabled strategic actions are becoming ever more challenging as hardware costs continue to decrease, off-the-shelf software reflecting industry best practices is increasingly available and affordable, and contemporary firms face intense rivalry and the unbundling of information and physical value chains. 5