Edging Ahead Through It

Traditionally, IT strategy has always followed business strategy. It is seen as a tool to be used for implementation of a business strategy. It focuses primarily on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of core processes defined by the business strategy.

A new way of thinking about IT

The dramatic change (inventions and innovations) in the area of information technology and communications has changed the way IT can be used as a competitive tool. The disruptive power of IT has broken (and will continue to do so in future) traditional rules of what can be done and how it can be done. This, coupled with liberalised global economy and increased competition has forced management looking for competitive advantage to have a relook at the enabling role of IT in strategy formulation . From How will IT support my business strategy?, one needs to ask How will IT impact business strategy?

Scan

The first step to an IT enabled strategy would be to scan the key technological changes taking place which would have an impact on business. The areas of change would be hardware, software and communications. From a functional point of view, one should look at key changes taking place in content creation, content aggregation, networking and customer premises equipment.

These changes enable new concepts like virtualisation and interactive reach. Virtualisation is the creation of digital representation of people, places, products, services, processes, markets and events. Interactive reach is reaching people, places, organisations, and things in an interactive way in real-time. The impact of IT on these concepts and any new concept in enables needs to be analysed in details.

Understand

The next step is to analyse and evaluate the business impact potential of the technological changes/concepts. For example, inventions in artificial intelligence can have an impact on product features or virtualisation can enable new distribution channels.

Imaging technology