Infrastructure investments - the other three contain applications, this fourth supports the other three. The IT capability includes both technical and managerial expertise required to provide reliable services. Utility - a necessary and unavoidable service that must be provided. Infrastructure costs are treated as administrative expense. Dependent - a business ties its infrastructure investments to specific, known business programs.
Infrastructure is viewed as smoothing the way for simplifying business processes.
Infrastructure influences strategy and vice-versa. This results in long-term flexibility, so that IT infrastructure planning spans shorter strategic plans. Although most vendors profess a firm commitment to open systems, many vendor implementations have proprietary elements that cause them to be closed systems. A driving force behind distributed computing is to give more people more control over their own work. Many organizations suffer from the NIH - or Not Invented Here syndrome, causing them to think that only systems built there are adequate for their processing needs.