You may be a sole proprietor, or even just a fledgling entrepreneur with zero capital, just an idea and insomnia. To start with, it is unlikely that you have enough time or expertise to fulfill all of the functions of your firm — from marketing to IT to accounting to legal to finance to sales. Some of these functions will have to be obtained from third parties as business services. How do you go about obtaining these services in such a way that advances your overall business strategy?

How you approach plugging up your deficits as an individual is a human resources problem and sets the stage for how your firm handles human resources down the line. Your time is finite and valuable. One solution is subcontracting the work to a third-party firm. This can be lucrative: Once you have reached a point where you can hire, you may have already made many HR decisions.

You may not have thought of them as such, but team-building, obtaining business services, and subcontracting are all HR decisions. A strong employee can increase productivity and profits, while a weak employee can decrease the same, and even potentially harm tarnish your reputation.


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I also tend to [give] the recommendations of other valued staff [great weight when hiring]. When asking what advice he would provide fledgling entrepreneurs, he offers, this on hiring: Get someone based on personality and their ability to work, not on their past work experience.

Get someone who is willing to learn what you want to teach them. E-mail is already registered on the site. Please use the Login form or enter another. You entered an incorrect username or password.

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A boosted job also called premium job will be shown ahead of all other similar basic jobs in the job search. In addition, boosted jobs are included in the recommended jobs widget and thereby reach passive job seekers. Innovation is the process of devising ways to do things in new and creative ways. Company leadership is very important in determining its competitive advantage using information technology.

In this case, they work hand in hand with a technical team to achieve this goal. Designing an information system that gives the competitive advantage needs at least two things. First, it requires an understanding of the business problem you are trying to solve. Doing so will help them better analyze technical issues if the need arises. It is imperative to view a business problem from the perspective of your customers.


  1. Use of Information Technology in Competitive Advantage - Use of Technology.
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  6. Because Daewoo marketing specialist looks over car adverts every day. He makes the proper research of his competitors, quality, advantages and prices of cars and then decides what discounts should be made so that Daewoo can sell suitably and it really sells.

    In this case information is of great significance for the company and for its profit and marketing competitiveness. Speaking about ITs, we should mention the acceleration in the growth of knowledge in science stimulating a dramatic increase in the number of new products based on new technology. To be the first , ITs have to be renewed continuously because of their short life cycle. Only, pretend that you are sitting in front of a computer and select EIS. Then using the menu you go to management by exclusion and you can see data about sales on your screen that is exclusively different from the other days.

    This is very important because the executive should find the purpose for it. If the sales have decreased strongly, maybe a competitor has gained a competitive advantage. Of course this information can be extracted without using a computer and it is still called information technology. But now I will not comment what the benefit of computers is. Of course if the area is quite competitive, analysis of the use of information should be made: Information begins to be shared within the organization as a corporate resource.

    Database capabilities begin to be exploited as users value information. Strategy making is related with maintaining comparative strategic advantage and monitoring future as well as interactive planning. Every organization must have some form of strategic management if it is considering "where is the organization going?

    7 Strategies to Define your Competitive Advantage

    And "where should the organization be going? Consideration of these questions is essential, given the changes and uncertainties of the business environment. Conventionally, in 'consultancy speak', the process of strategic management has involved managers answering questions such as: Where is the organization now?

    Given the external trends, where does the organization want to be? What actions must be implemented to achieve the specified goals? As part of this process, information is gathered and used in management formulating an explicit plan of priorities for action with appropriate allocation of resources that will take the organization forward.

    Information Technology Strategies: How Leading Firms use IT to gain an Advantage

    Explicit attention must be given to the changing nature and scope of the industry, together with the particular competencies of the organization. Situation analyses are completed, such as SWOT analysis Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats , as are portfolio analyses to determine an organization's best mix of business and of products and services. Strategy formulation is undertaken at different levels, usually: Strategy has become an over-used and much-abused terms, being frequently made unnecessarily complicated. At a simple level, the following Figure captures the underlying and interrelated dimensions of any organization's strategy formulation and implementation: The essence of strategic management should be action rather than the process of developing the strategy or the document itself, with the ability to cope with uncertainty, devolve responsibility and to retain control.

    Many managers who devise formal mission statements, specify long-term objectives and prioritize implementation plans, not only waste enormous amounts of time and resources, but also delude themselves into believing that they are managing strategically, even though the strategy is never implemented. While some additional flexibility can always be introduced into this process, if only by last minute revisions, the real business issues and competitive assessments are frequently not examined sufficiently thoroughly.

    All too often, because of unanticipated changes in the business environment managers are obliged to make hasty decisions, without consideration of their strategic consequences and sometimes in contradiction of the strategy. Criticism of the traditional formal strategic management process could, but should not, be interpreted as abdication of responsibility by management.

    The essential ingredients are vision, leadership and, increasingly, information which is both useful and actionable. In any event, strategic management is not a separate kind of management at all, it is simply management. Effective day-to-day management requires tight, short-term control, state of the art Management Information and Control systems. Without them there will be little management time for the strategic and there will be no tool to implement it.

    Such systems provide some short-term order in what is fundamentally a disorderly situation.


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    As information shifts away , business risks increases. Business can reduce the risk involved by developing effective support strategy expertise. Information resources management plays a very important role in this. Information is quite important regarding the following: Managers should have the advantage of being able to identify and analyze strategic options in considerable depth, possibly sooner than competitors and there should be more precise control over the implementation of the selected corporate business strategy.

    Because of the quickly changing environment, the process of strategy formulation transforms from an apparently formal and systematic set of procedures for analysis and planning to an adhoc reaction by the senior management of an organization to perceived problems and information about them. In strategy formulation, managers must consider both information about internal and external forces.

    The opportunities and threats in the industry must be considered within the context of the organization's strengths and weaknesses, all of which cannot be divorced from the broader social setting and the leadership and vision of the key people for implementation. Influenced by the early Harvard Business School strategists Michael Porter illustrates aspects of organizational positioning and the factors affecting an industry's overall profitability.

    The model of the five forces in competition is used for defining the competitive strategy in an industry.

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    This model has been greatly influential especially in the development of corporate business strategy. Also the model shows how information and communication technologies can influence the kind and strength of competitiveness. Porter used the word industry but he means strategic groups in an industry e. He thinks that competition is bigger in this group of enterprises. The influence of information and communication technologies on the different competitive forces shows the direct relation of information with the potential business advantages of the company.

    This influence is related with the increase of information that is used for decision making and infrastructure support in respect of information technologies. The competitive forces are changing continuously influenced not only by external socio-economic and political factors but also by the changing business structure influenced by the development of information and communication technology.