Strategy in information intensive services

Information intensive services (IIS) constitute the largest portion of the US economy in terms of GNP, jobs, and wage bill shares. Major categories of IIS include transactional (financial, eCommerce), functional (search and information), content delivery (music, news), markets and exchanges (eBay), social networks (Facebook, Twitter), and asset sharing platforms (Airbnb, Uber). The advances in information and communications technologies have been the primary driver of growth in IIS in recent decades. In this paper, we examine managerial implications of the changes in IIS and discuss general and sector-specific strategies. For example, while IIS are quite diverse, there are some technology-induced general strategies that work well for many of them, including industrialization, service redesign, vertical de-integration, globalization, lateral expansion, mobile access, platform models and service bundling. In contrast, there are sector-specific strategies, such as digital experience management, monetization methods, crowd sourcing, flexible contracting, automation of physical services and servitization of products.