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Abm 750 Harvard Case Summary

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BADM 750 Micro Final Examination Jayme Salo

When considering the IT management portfolio triangle consisting of infrastructural, transactional, informational, and strategic systems in regards to the Nicholas Carr’s viewpoint on information technology, I do not believe that his thoughts apply equally to all types of IT investments. Consider most Transactional System IT investments undertaken today. These systems are designed to help streamline and standardize the collection, modification, and retrieval of transactional data within a business. These systems typically perform well, and maintain consistency and reliability. When observing only transactional systems, I would agree with Nicholas Carr and say that this type of IT investment …show more content…

These types of investments are where I would disagree most with Carr’s viewpoint regarding the commoditization of IT in business. The pure reason for such an IT investment is to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors. This can be accomplished in a number of ways starting with the overall infrastructure makeup of the IT, all the way to the capabilities and skills of the IT users. The IT itself can be highly complex and customized for a specialized field, making the barrier to entry for competitors quite high. Conversely, the organization can essentially wed its consumers to the organization by offering a variety of useful services to which they can leverage to make the switching costs to another competitor(s) extremely high. Moreover, having a highly knowledgeable and skilled IT workforce can also increase competitive advantage for the organization by finding new ways to leverage their IT against their competitors which is extremely hard to replicate. One example of this type of system was discussed in the case regarding Cardinal Health. Cardinal Health’s expert knowledge and leveraged use of data warehousing, integrated with SAP R/3, to successfully implement an advanced business intelligence platform created a noticeable competitive advantage within their industry. Going further, it also set precedent for what other competing firms would have to strive for. They did so well, I would …show more content…

These two types of systems are where I would agree with Carr in the sense that the future of these types of IT systems ability to create a competitive advantage is possible, but limited and temporary. Furthermore, the commoditization of these types of systems is imminent, if not already underway. These systems create the base foundation for organizations looking to scale enterprise-wide in order to meet growing customer and organizational demands. Many of these systems can be integrated as off-the-shelf systems, but all of them feature customizable options which is where the temporary competitive advantage lies other than those who are still first movers in their industries. These systems were of much discussion throughout the course, including many ERP and CRM implementation examples. Many of our discussions though highlighted the failures organizations exhibited in their implementation of such large scale projects, such as the case on BBI Inc., and their agreement with SupERP. As far as Carr’s comments go in relation to these two types of IT investments, I believe he is correct in that organizations future approaches to implementing more off-the-shelf designs and thus limiting the exposure and risk associated with these systems will increase. Organizations will refrain from options and designs that are highly customized in order to meet existing

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