Information Strategy for Business Networks
The world is changing towards better communication setup, state of the art information technology with a wide variety of options for small, medium and large scale business vendors. These business models have sidelined the conventional business methodologies and it is time for the government to adopt a framework to provide guidance, monitor the growing business and control them with business policies. Businesses which could follow the guidelines and accept these policies have flourished and the others went into problems.
Economic reconstruction has been possible with the advent of information world comprising of software and hardware designed to produce the necessary information required to manage the business process. Digital information refers to any information that can be represented in terms of series of digital bits which can be handled by digital devices for transmitting, receiving and processing to generate meaningful information.
The information thus obtained can be of different value to different domains like entertainment, business, sports, finance and many more. But each of these domains has different strategies to adopt the information technology. The infrastructure for such a technology is generally costly but involves cheap navigational cost. Therefore it depends on the domain to utilize the technology for generating profit or improvising the business process.
Most of the organizations either a high-tech manufacturing unit or a service industry , are considering some methodology of reengineering their business process to establish information technology infrastructure to meet this new competitive world of technology. Focus on the staff training, development and support to build information technology skill and competencies and to enhance in-depth problem solving thereby increasing the value of implementing the information technology infrastructure.
Defining Information Strategy
Recent improvements in the information technology has changed the way organizations conduct business. Companies slash their expenditure with the help of real-time communication devices, availability of internet and implementing latest business models like distributed network and trading hubs. Yet many business organizations lack to achieve the optimum due to lack of proportion strategies for implementing IT infrastructure.
Strategic utilization of Information Technology involves business oriented approach to use the features of information technology. There is a need to adopt a framework to maximize the use of Information technology assets. The use of information systems should reshape the strategy of the organization and culture. The methods for embedding the information technology into the existing business process needs to be identified so as to achieve required change in the structure and culture of the organization.
The organization roles and responsibilities needs to be redefined matching with the information strategy. Encourage activities on research and development on the implementation and maintenance issues of Information technology in the business. The protocol for data communication and network services needs to be identified. Information strategy should also account for work group activities.
All the projects, systems and organizational practices should correspond to the value of the technology. This can be achieved through a System Development Life cycle model which enhances the intended life span on the use of information technology infrastructure.
Tackling Competition
Several organizations implement Information Technology to improvise the business. This introduces competition in the world of information technology. The major factors determining the competition in the market are bargaining power of suppliers, buyers bargaining power, new entrants, effect of substitute products or services, intensity of the competition, standing in the conventional business rivals and many more. It is also important to understand the possibility of reengineering the core business value and modify the basis of the competition. The business relationship and power among the buyers and suppliers needs to be balanced.
The organization needs to find out ways to reduce the barriers in the entry for the customers because of the competition. It is also important to understand the importance of increasing or decreasing the switching cost. The possibility of adding values and services to the existing products to create new product lines using information technology needs to be tried out. Poor understanding of the base of the competitive dynamics in the market within which the organization competes can lead to big failure while implementing IT in business.
There is a need to understand the long term impact of strategic system launched by a counterpart or another industry in the competitive market. Launch a system which can bring out litigation and regulate the detriment of the innovator. The other factors to be considered for understanding the challenges in managing the competition in the IT business network are failure to account for the time, effort and expenditure required to ensure user adoption, understanding and effective utilization.
Managing Intellectual property rights
It is understood that the initial cost for producing information through latest technology is expensive but the same becomes very cheap for reproducing. While reproducing information becomes cheap, there is a possibility for other to make it much cheaper by just copying the stuff and make their initial cost of generating the cheapest. This has created the need for having a copyright and establishes some form of private ownership for the information thus produced.
The United States government has authorized the congress to provide copyrights to the authors and inventors in the field of science, arts and technology. In the case of digital information these guidelines, policies and rules are not clear to manage the intellectual property. With the use of internet and the vulnerability of digital information to be copied and transmitted over internet making it very difficult to trace it world wide and control the intellectual property rights.
Internet has proven to be a giant copying machine challenging the Information Technology community to control its misuse. The producers of the information have very little probability of recovering their cost of producing the information which have been copied and sold out legitimately. Especially those published through web content needs to have some mechanism to avoid copying and reproducing in various other formats.
Versioning of the information might create some difficulty for others to copy and follow up. There has been a considerable effort to enforce all agencies involved in handling digital information with policies, guidelines and framework to maintain integrity of the ownership of the digital information.
