My business/IT analysis toolkit
January 14, 2009
The start of a series in which I discuss analytical frameworks for business/IT questions.
My business/IT analysis toolkit
This post is the start of a series in which I discuss various frameworks and models that I might be able to use to answer questions on my CGU IST screening exam of Jan 23. I had said that I wanted to build a toolkit of things that will help me answer questions. I think that there are two tacks that I want to take: an IT policy and strategy toolkit, and a research toolkit. This essay describes my IT policy and strategy toolkit.
I’m going to include these frameworks in my toolkit, and I will discuss each one in a separate post:
- The value of IT
- Porter’s five forces model of competition in a market
- Porter’s value chain analysis model
- McFarlan’s strategic grid model
- Enterprise architecture
- SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats)
- Henderson and Venkatraman’s strategic alignment model
The value of IT
While I’ve talked about this before and at greater length, let’s start by reviewing what IT can do for the firm. The value of IT can be seen in three ways: it can deliver useful information to the people who need it when they need it; it can allow people to communicate and collaborate better; and it can supply one value at the moment of implementation while enabling other (possibly unknown at the time of implementation) options down the road with the same technology. The way it does this is by improving processing power and speed (we can do more things faster, possibly things that humans cannot do by themselves), by delivering information faster and to the place and person who needs it, and by representing that information in ways most suitable for humans to understand, utilize and manipulate in order to enable sensemaking, decisions and action.
Thanks so much for these super articles. They are so consise and clear, magic! Well done.