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Information and communication technology already has a long history of influence in basically all areas of an enterprise. In recent years though, a major discussion emerged whether information and communication technologies offer an additional strategic value for a business. The different positions maintain reasonable arguments on both sides. One position is that ICT basically has become a commodity, obtainable by everyone. There would be no strategical nor competitive gain, so extra efforts in ICT would be in vain. Another position is that, although, nowadays ICT is easy to acquire, the organisational skills necessary to manage the change and to profit from a good system are a scarce resource and difficult to reproduce. In order to get answers to this dispute, semi-structured telephone interviews with leading ICT officers were conducted. The outcome gives a broad overview on what practitioners consider as strategically important in ICT systems and what the current view of the academic guild on this question looks like.

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While studying Information Systems at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, the author worked as a consultant in ICT-security and change management projects for over 8 years. During this time, he gathered comprehensive practical knowledge on questions of data security and integrity. This expertise serves as a basis for this work.

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