Describe in your option, how can information itself provide competitive advantage to an organisations?
Information as a major asset of a company enables the firm to quickly adapt to the fast changing environment. This ability is called dynamic capability and appears to be an essential part of businesses’ competitive advantage. Dynamic refers to the ability of fast responding to the external and internal threats and opportunities of the business environment. Considering the variability of informational technologies, this can be an effective tool of influence on competitive advantage.
The Information provides a competitive advantage to a company in different ways. First of all, information technologies enable knowledge management to collect and analyse the information and positively affect dynamic capability. Also, knowledge management urges employees to get necessary information which they are lack of. However, the information is transferred within the organization, thus not considering the external sources. The information provides the competitive advantage by enabling companies to surpass their competitors (Mitchell, 2015, p. 178). Rivals outperform can be achieved through the product or price advantage. Also, it turns the current opportunities into the new ones by improving them. Finally, it modifies the completion rules, thereby changing the business environment.
However, to provide the competitive advantage, the information must be relevant, beneficial and unique. Nevertheless, information itself does not have this value. Only after profound analysis by the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is can be considered and used to benefit the company. Lastly, information provided by customers in the form of complaints and propositions significantly influences on the dynamic capability. It enables the company to adapt quickly and improve its competitive advantage.
Are there any associated risks and implications?
The widespread usage of informational technologies has particular risks. The ability of information to contribute to the improvement of the business structure and environment can also destroy the company. For example, the information technology, now, allows companies to changes prices regularly and quickly respond on rival’s advantage. At the same time, competitors reduce their prices thereby lowering the fair structure. Customers get profitable proposition but less involvement into the purchasing process. As a result, the interaction between the company and its consumers reduces.
Another implication comes from the role of the CIO within the company. Among the major CIO’s functions, there is the responsibility for the information collection from the partners or from the external sources. CIO must allocate the potentially useful information for the product development in order to meet the customer needs. The customer indirect participation must be associated with the business process. Thus, CIO should find a way to accomplish this.
In general organisations rely on information to provide competitive advantage and the role of the CIO is to support this process. Provide two contrasting example based on this argument?
The role of the CIO is to establish effective internal and external interconnection within the company and outside of it and to scout the business environment. The dynamic capability of the company refers to the CIO’s ability to quickly react to the impermanence of the market. Also, CIOs are responsible for highlighting the crucial information to provide the competitive advantage. They analyse the significance of the available information and decide which one will beneficially contribute the company. Another CIO’s obligation is identifying the innovative solution and discarding the rest information that is of no value. Often they use the benchmarking approach to prioritize the information potentially beneficial to the company’s improvement. However, there is another contradictive CIO’s function as he is involved into the process of the cost reduction. From the one hand, the c-level manager must search for innovative solutions for the business development, which are, usually, of high cost. From the other hand, he is obliged to develop the procedure of cost reduction otherwise the company will not get the competitive advantage. The collaboration with third parties and colleagues gives CIO the dynamic capability. Finally, CIO is responsible for the cost minimisation which can be contradictive sometimes with the idea of the business renovation.
Reference
Mitchell, J 2015. Staying the course as a CIO, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, West Sussex.