IT Technology
The successful company will be driven to
increase stakeholder value and
profitability while creating a working
environment that encourages and nurtures
the growth of personal creativity
and development as well as nurturing a sense
of well-being for all members of
the organization. When dealing with the forces
that drive industry
competition, a company can devise a strategy that takes the
offensive. This
posture is designed to do more than merely cope with the forces
themselves;
it is meant to alter their causes. The IT professional's role in
competitive
market intelligence The IT professional is increasingly being called
upon to
be a sleuth in the quest for the competitive market intelligence that is
so
necessary to support the enterprise's overall business strategy. In
today's
fast-changing marketplace, it is essential to monitor the techniques
of similar
businesses, and IT is being called upon to fulfill that functional
need. IT must
provide marketing with answers to vital questions such as: 1.
How are
competitors getting business? 2. Where does the enterprise look for
new
customers? 3. How are prospects targeted? 4. What services, products, and
prices
do competitors offer? 5. What images do our competitors project, and
how does
that compare to our image? The combined strength of marketing and IT
Enterprises
have depended on marketing for too long to provide competitive
intelligence. It
is crucial for IT professionals to contribute their
specialized expertise to
successfully adapt to the changing dynamics of the
market arena. Marketing
cannot do the job without the cooperation, tools, and
willing support of the IT
department. With the combined strength of the two
complementary functions, a
winning competitive market intelligence program is
within the enterprise's
reach. Useful and sometimes surprising insights can
be gained from exploring the
terrain of actual and potential competitors.
Hardly an academic exercise, sizing
up the competition should become an
ongoing, regular, and systematic process of
gathering, analyzing, and acting
upon relevant data, which will provide
businesses with two tangible benefits:
? It will reveal the steps that
management must take to preempt competitive
strikes. ? It will signal new
market opportunities. Competitive monitoring
enables management to develop
practical strategies and measure the success of
their actions. What you should
know Simply knowing who your competitors are
is not enough; you should also
ferret out what their strategies and
objectives are. You can gauge their
strengths and weaknesses by learning
about their products and services (current
and new), pricing, features, and
the level of customer satisfaction. How are
your products or services
positioned relative to the competition? Do your
customers and prospects see
your service as having the highest quality and still
selling at the lower
price? Is your product viewed as the low-cost brand, the
premium-priced
brand, the old standby, or the leader? After getting some
comments, it may
still be neither possible nor desirable to change your
service's features.
Instead, research could point out what to communicate and
how to communicate
to your market. For example, you could tell your marketing
department what
potential customers are looking for and highlight the features
that are
valued by your customers. Your information will enable the marketing
people
to create materials that tell customers what they want to hear and sell
them
what they want to buy. Differences can be subtle but they really do
matter.
Are yesterday's customers and clients being lured away by today's
competition?
Are they being tempted by the competition's siren song? Are
they saying yes to
your rival's lower fees or discounts? Are they buying new
products or services
that your company has not even thought of offering? Who
will provide the
answers? IT can, at the very least, provide meaningful data
to formulate the
correct solutions. Potential market threats While management
understands the
importance of keeping an eye on the competition, some members
of management
mistakenly believe that the marketing department alone has the
resources to do a
proper job. This is simply not true. Much valuable
information exists in the
database mines of the IT function. The IT
professional must do some of the
digging in those mines to find it. Most IT
professionals are already in an
excellent position to obtain and use primary
competitive information and need
only the encouragement or permission of
management. Frequently, IT has become
the central repository for this kind of
competitive analysis information.
However, using the information can be a
challenge when different departments
within the company engage in territorial
squabbles, and the company is forced to
dilute valuable resources through
unnecessary duplications of effort. In such
situations, management must
educate all departments to funnel customer and
prospect data back to a
central IT point. Emphasize your strengths The benefits
of a competitive
intelligence effort coordinated by the IT department are: 1.
Learning the
enterprise's strengths and weaknesses. 2. Learning whom is and who
is not
buying. 3. Determining customers' and prospects' buying plans.
4.
Anticipating rather than reacting to the market. 5. Taking the
competition
seriously. They are not going to vanish. Equally important, but
occasionally
overlooked, is that competitive research, if done well, can give
your company a
refreshing appreciation of the role of the IT function and a
better
understanding of your company's own competitive strengths. You may
discover, for
instance, that your firm's style or delivery is more
appreciated or valued by
customers than management may have realized. Knowing
this facilitates your
exploitation of those strengths. Conclusion In
conclusion, the awareness of
these forces can help a company stake out a
position in its industry that is
less vulnerable to attack. Many factors
determine the nature of competition,
including not only rivals, but also the
economics of particular industries, new
entrants, the bargaining power of
customers and suppliers, and the threat of
substitute services or products. A
strategic plan of action based on this might
include: positioning the company
so that its capabilities provide the best
defense against the competitive
forces; influencing the balance of forces
through strategic moves; and
anticipating shifts in the factors underlying
competitive forces.
Increasingly, corporations are recognizing the strategic
role of the
operations function. These organizations are discovering that a
focus on
customer needs is effective only if the operations function is designed
and
managed to meet those needs. From acquiring raw materials to
fabricating
parts, to assembling products, to customer delivery, a total
systems perspective
can enable them, in the ideal, to fashion an operations
function like the inner
workings of a finely tuned machine. Today that
operation can be fine-tuned by
using modern information
systems.
Bibliography
Fox, J. (1984). The IT Professional’s Role
in Competitive Market
Intelligence TechRepublic
http://www.techrepublic.com/article.jhtml?id=r00619991216fox01.htm