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While the marketing concept provides the strategic motivation that continues to turn American business towards the marketplace, little attempt has been made to create a metric that is specifically intended to reflect the role and importance of the consumer on improved organizational performance, especially when evaluating intangibles as services and intellectual contribution. Traditionally, productivity measures have been used to evaluate performance improvement that are internally originated and not externally oriented, as suggested by the marketing concept. Therefore, productivity measurement generally fails to measure the customer/consumer originated value developed by service processes and does not account for performance improvement due to other highly intangible factors such as quality or difficult to quantify consumer benefits. Herein, customer/consumer originated value is explored as a basis for organization wide performance measurement that is synchronous with the market driven directive: customer focus. The authors present a theoretical framework that develops and supports the use of value based performance measures.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of Hispanic ethnicity on the adoption and use of information and communication technology (ICT) tools by small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in a southwestern renewal community (RC).

The paper investigates the influence of ethnicity on the adoption and use of information and communications technologies in small and medium enterprises using a sample from the RC of a large southwestern metroplex.

Results point to a continuing digital divide among Hispanic and non‐Hispanic SME owners. Non‐Hispanic SME owners were found to be much more likely to adopt a wider range of ICTs and to use them for both administrative and analytical purposes. Hispanic SME owners not only failed to adopt a full range of ICTs but also they were less likely to use ICTs for long‐term strategic analyses.

The differences presented in this paper suggest that Hispanic SME owners may not be exploiting ICTs in order to achieve optimal operating efficiency and strategic effectiveness. The outcomes are particularly alarming because SMEs in RC areas have been the target of federal efforts to raise business productivity and profitability. The continuing digital divide may be undermining the very polices designed to enhance business operations in these relatively disadvantaged urban areas.