Course: Competitive Advantage: Using Information to Build Business Success

Well done on working through Week 2 of the course. This week we explored the IT portfolio framework. What underlies a business’ ability to gain a competitive advantage over its …

Scoping your comparative advantage is essential. As a business owner you may be the first to use ICT in your market to increase the competitiveness of your business. This may …

Pic Nic Pak’s point of difference. The animation shows a salesman selling the same system to a number of neighbouring restaurants. Each cafe uses the IT solution to automate sections …

The implementation of the new ordering system at Pic Nic Pak cafe is based on a real-life case. In what follows, we will explore the different types of value returns …

The IT portfolio draws on the four different types of assets and identifies the relationship of these to specific business returns. If you consider the Pic Nic Pak cafe example, …

The real value of business analytics is how they can enhance business performance. The animation of the Pic Nic Pak cafe highlights the way that business automation brings a range …

Welcome to Week 2 where we will explore how different kinds of IT investments provide different types of business value. Researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management investigated IT …

Are efficiency gains ALL that we can expect from ICT? This week we introduced the notion of competitive advantage and how it can be gained through investment in and implementation …

This week we focused on how ICT can deliver business value through automation and information. A critical component of any investment, including information technology investments, is that it must fit …

The information that IT systems provide can lead to a cycle of business model evolution. As we learned so far, in order for this evolution to happen there needs to …

Is Pic Nic Pak any different from other businesses on the high street? Let us explore some of the changes and benefits at Pic Nic Pak and generalise them into …

Information is the other side of the automation process: to automate also means to ‘informate’. The automatic collection of data enable many more details to be recorded. So automating the …

The core of good business decision making is aligning the business model and ICT investments. There are several ways the use of technology can deliver financial returns to businesses. Automation …

Technology can automate manual processes. But this is only the beginning of how it adds business value. In a previous step, we introduced Pic Nic Pak a family-owned cafe, which …

The right technology ‘fit’ with a business model provides the best return on financial and time investment. Ultimately, a business’s model and its technology need to work together and support …