Week 2 Questions

Explain information technology’s role in business and describe how you measure success?

The role of information technology in business is very important. IT is very important in business because IT is everywhere.

IT success is extremely hard to measure. So by determining the return on investment of the new computer is very difficult. When determining the success of IT systems, there are several questions that need to be asked. These are:

• Is the internal IT operation performing satisfactorily?
• Should I outsource some or all of the IT operations?
• How is my outsourcer performing?
• What are the risk factors to consider in an IT project?
• What questions should be asked to ensure an IT project proposal is realistic?
• What are the characteristics of a healthy project?
• Which factors are most critical to monitor to ensure the project remains on track?

By asking these questions, executives are able to determine how successful their IT business is.

List and describe each of the forces in Porter’s Five Forces Model?

Porters five forces model includes:

1. buyer power: high when buyers have many sellers to choose from and low when they don't
2. supplier power: high when one supplier has has concentrated power over an industry
3. threat of substitute products or services: high when there are many alternatives to a product or service and low when few market alternatives to choose from
4. threat of new entrants: high when it is easy for competition to enter a market and low when there are significant barriers
5. rivalry among existing competitors: high when competition is in a fierce market and low when competition is more complacent

Describe the relationship between business processes and value chains?

A business process is a standardised set of activities that accomplish a specific task, such as processing a customers order. A value chain approach views an organisation as a series of processes, each of which adds value to the product or service for each consumer. These two aspects work together in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the busienss processes and to create a competitive advantage.

Compare Porter’s three generic strategies?

Porter has three generic Strategies: Broad cost leadership, Broad Differentiation and a Focused strategy. Broad strategies reach a large market segment, while focused strategies have a much smaller market. A focused strategy focuses on either cost leadership or fiffferentiation





All answers came from Business Driven Information Systems (Baltzan, Phillips, Lynch, Blakey)