Ultimately, it is every company’s goal to be operationally sound and profitable. It is the manager’s role to create a plan to achieve this goal. Over these past two weeks, we have read about a few examples that can help a company grow and become successful. These aren’t items that you can pick one or two of the options as if you are deciding whether to eat pasta or steak for dinner, these are actions that should represent the main dish, sides, drink, and desserts that will ensure the best “meal” a company can have. Business strategy, IT strategy, operating models, enterprise architecture, and IT service management all cohesively work together to create a competitive business. However, there are different routes to take through each of these depending on your business. I believe it is best for a manager to decide what the company’s strategy is first as this will lay the ground for the rest of the decisions to come. Porter explains a few topics such as operational effectiveness, productivity frontier, and strategic positioning that many managers think is their strategy, but they are things to be included in one’s overall strategy. The reason these topics are included in business strategy is because they help boost the business as a whole. Porter describes operational effectiveness as “performing similar activities better than rivals perform them”, productivity frontier as “the maximum value a company can deliver at a given cost, given the best available technology, skills, and management techniques” and strategic positioning as “performing different activities as rivals, or performing similar activities in different ways” (Porter). Identifying your business strategy at the beginning will help you choose your IT strategy, operating model, enterprise architecture and other decisions later with it in mind so they all align. The next step would be to choose an operating model. This should be chosen with your business strategy in the back of your mind, and this will help determine how your business will operate based on your needs. There are four groups within the operating model that differ in the levels of process integration and process standardization. These types include diversification, coordination, unification, and replication. No type is better than the other, overall, but if it does not align with your business strategy, then the operating model will be of no benefit to your company and will most likely cause costly changes later on. The benefit of choosing the right quadrant for your company, is it will help organize how to execute the strategy that you choose. Choosing the Diversification operating model will help with the interaction and cooperation of related but not integrated business units while potentially providing economies of scale. The benefits of choosing the Coordination operating model are with high integration you can get integrated customer service, cross selling, and transparency, but this comes with not being able to expect low costs. The Replication operating model focuses more on standardized business processes and less on customer relationships. If a company did not use standardized business processes and focused on customer relationships, you can see how this operating model would not benefit them at all. The last operating model is Unification. Those who choose this model focus on high integration of data and standardization with business processes. Just like choosing your strategy won’t get you very far, neither will choosing your operating model. It only outlines expectations dealing with standardization and integration. What will give you more detail and structure is the enterprise architecture which will also build a bridge between business and technology processes. Enterprise architecture includes policies, principles, and technology decisions that a business needs to organize their business and IT strategies as well as their execution plans. It is common for the enterprise architecture to be created solely by the IT staff, but it is wise to have the senior management team create a general vision for the enterprise architecture through a core diagram that relates directly to their operating model. The core diagram is a general layout of relationships between business, technology, and operations and it has different characteristics that are dependent on the type of operating model it is relating to, so it is important for business management to correctly choose the best operating model and the layout of the enterprise architecture that will best fit their business objectives. This will help the IT staff have a clear understanding of business’s goals and help connect the business strategies with the IT strategies. As important as choosing the business strategy, operating model, and the enterprise architecture are for the business, it is also to help the ITSM to clearly understand the business side to aid the creation of technology processes that will provide assistance to all operational aspects. These will also be used to create the IT strategy so that they align correctly to avoid future problems. The IT strategy is to lay out how IT will help with the business strategy by creating a vision for how it will use its resources to support the business outcomes. An effective IT strategy will include an understanding of business processes, a list of business services, and most importantly how the IT organization will interact with the business. The business strategy, IT strategy, operating model, enterprise architecture, and ITSM all need to have strong communication and transparent goals with one another so that each idea aligns and can create an organized and competitive company. Works Cited Porter, Michael. “What is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review. December 1996, www.hbr.org Robertson, David, Ross, Jeanne, Weill, Peter. “Define Your Operating Model.” Harvard Business Press. 2008, https://hbsp.harvard.edu/download?url=%2Fcourses%2F811010%2Fitems%2F8070BCPDF-ENG%2Fcontent&metadata=e30%3D Robertson, David, Ross, Jeanne, Weill, Peter. “Implement the Operating Model Via Enterprise Architecture.” Harvard Business Press. 2008, https://hbsp.harvard.edu/download?url=%2Fcourses%2F811010%2Fitems%2F8069BCPDF-ENG%2Fcontent&metadata=e30%3D Taylor, Sharon. Service Intelligence. Improving Your Bottom Line with the Power of IT Service Management. 1st edition, Prentice Hall, 2007.
