Strategic Initiatives for Implementing
Competitive Advantage
Great products—Innovative products
Doesn’t matter---Bad processes—no perceived value
1) You want customers to
2) You have
at a price customers are willing to
Using IT to gain a competitive advantage
• Businesses use IT to give themselves a
– Customers
the
• How can we
? Is there a
– Businesses have to understand
• Find
• Remove
• Recognize smooth running processes
than
?
Business Processes Drive IT choices
• Business strategies and goals
– Figure out business
get the job done
—then select IT to
• Managers often find themselves in the difficult position of changing
a business process because the system can’t support the ideal
solution.
• Typically
• When considering change, alternative business
processes should be:
– 1) Effective:
– 2) Efficient:
intended value.
– 3) Adaptable/flexible and
• Technology and market forces constantly change
for the
Changes to Improve
Business Processes
• Automation: Operational process
– Manual tasks become
• Streamlining: Managerial process
–S
–E
– Eliminate bottlenecks
and/or redundancies
• Reengineer business processes: strategic process change
– Find a
– Flat world has more competition than ever before as there are
more companies and customers in the global marketplace.
– Focus on core processes that are
rather
than on margin processes that have little impact
Finding Opportunity Using Business
Process Improvement
• A company can improve the
way it travels the road by
moving from foot to horse
and then horse to car
– Follow the same path as
before, but just do it faster
• Business Process
Improvement looks at taking
a
, such as an
airplane which ignore the
road completely
Businesses can also improve their
competitiveness by changing what they do
• Focusing on
– Putting together all of the pieces so that you can better
understand your business, the environment that it
operates in, and the factors that influence it.
– Set of methodologies, processes, architectures and
technologies that transform raw data into meaningful
information (business intelligence) to enable more
effective decision making and better insights into the
business (strategical, tactical and operational).
– Goal: to
• Moving to the “cloud” may also help improve an
organization’s ability to be competitive.