Saturday, March 12, 2011

Week 2 Questions

Explain information technology’s role in business and describe how you measure success?
Information technology is directly linked throughout every aspect in business. 
IT both provides a great insight to anyone learning about business, and gives those an advantage whilse potential to tranform it. 
> Reduces costs, improves productivity & generating growth. role= facilitating communication and inc. business intelligence (each business function.) = effective & efficient. 


Measure IT's success= Usually measuring ROI indicates success rate. Difficult for IT  as hard to tell. egs 'such as is the internal IT operation performing satisfactorily?' or 'How is my outsourcer performing?'
Main important KPI's include
(i) Efficiency and effectiveness metrics;
efficiency measure the performance of the IT system including the throughput, speed and availability. 
effectiveness measure the impact including customer satisfaction, conversion rates and sell-through increases. both ensuring the business is achieving its goals and objectives. 
(ii) Benchmarking (Baseline metrics/ values). This process of continuously measuring system results, comparing to benchmark values and identifying steps to improve. 


List and describe each of the forces in Porter’s Five Forces Model?
Five Forces models maintain competitiveness. 
1. Buyer power: strong buyer power is monopsony ie. one buyer with many suppliers can control the price. This is reduced through loyalty programs (eg. upgrades etc)
2. Supplier power: High when reliant on one supplier (control price, quality and shifting costs. eg microsoft.) This is decreased through standardisation - and easily switch suppliers. 
3. threat of substitute products/services: must maintain competitive advantage to alternatives by switching costs
4. threat of new entrants: Entry barriers are what customers have come to expect and must be offered from a new business to come to survive. 
5. Rivalry among existing competitors: high when competitive market, low when more complacent. Reduce rival power by switching costs.


Describe the relationship between business processes and value chains?
Business process is a standardised set of activities to accomplish a specific task- each of these processess add value to this 'value chain.' play a integral role in strategy execution.
Compare Porter’s three generic strategies?
Through comparison between (i) Broad Cost leadership: low cost to a wide market, appealing to a large audience (ii) Broad differentiation range of prices at several price points  gaining a large stratified audience and (iii) Narrow Focused strategy is niche and somewhat exclusive.


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