REFLECTIVE 1 : INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Nowadays, technology always keeps changing year by year.  All the gadgets always are improved gradually. In the recent class, Dr. Roya stated that information system in human resources can give improvement on organization. Besides, it provides competitive advantage for the companies. With the advent of advanced technology, most organizations want “something” that can give them great benefits to compete with other organizations. However, the use of this technology should fit with the organization’s strategy.  Otherwise, the organization may be the ‘destroyed’ such as bankruptcy and high turnover.

On the other hand, IT plays a major role in reengineering most business processes. It can substantially increase process efficiencies, improves communication inside or outside organization, and also facilitates collaboration.

So, from what I understand about competitive strategic is it about advantage that a firm has over its competitors, allowing it to generate greater sales or margins or retain more customers than its competition. There are five ways to gain competitive advantage such as cost leadership, differentiation strategy, innovation strategy, growth strategy, and alliance strategy.

    Through cost leadership, a company can gain advantage if it can sell more units at a lower price while providing quality and maintaining or increasing its profit margin. As we know, all the customers like to pay a little as possible. So, one way to increase market share is to lower the prices by reduce the costs. Then, differentiation means that company must focus on what they need to improve. They just need to differentiate a firm’s products from its competitors’.

Furthermore, organization also must create a new and unique product or services. Through this innovation strategy, many organizations and individual needs give an organization a great competitive advantage for example eBay. Other than that, with the advent of growth strategy, it allows an organization to enter the global market. Through this strategy, the product or services can be diversifying. For the last strategy is alliance strategy. Companies can the competitive advantage by combining services to enable customers to use the same technology for purchases from different companies. For example, airlines company with hotel and car rental firms to offer travel and lodging packages.

In a nutshell, from what I get after the class finished, the organization must have their systematic and advance strategies to compete with other organization.

References :

• Oz. E (2008). Management Information Systems. Cengage Learning