Week 3: The Organisational Context for Emerging

Technologies

Emerging Technologies in Business

Today’s Goals

• Why would organisations use these technologies?

• How are these technologies being used now?

• A sampling of technologies and their use• The bottom line – ROI from emerging

technologies

Why use emerging technologies?

• Competitive advantage

• Return on investment (ROI)• Customer convenience

• Demand from suppliers and/or customers

• Streamlining of operations

• When a organisation sustains profits that exceed the average for its industry, the firm is said to possess a competitive advantage over its rivals. The goal of much of business strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

• Porter identifies 2 types of Competitive Advantage:– cost advantage– differentiation

Competitive Advantage - Defined

• To develop a competitive advantage an organisation must have resources & capabilities that are superior to those of its competitors

• Resources are assets specific to the organisation useful for creating a cost or differentiation advantage and that few competitors can acquire easily.

• Capabilities refer to the organisation's ability to utilise its resources effectively

Competitive Advantage - Defined

• The organisational resources and capabilities together form its distinctive competencies– these competencies enable innovation, efficiency,

quality, and customer responsiveness– all of these can be leveraged to create a cost or a

differentiation advantage

• Can you see the case for emerging technologies creating Competitive Advantage for an organisation?

Competitive Advantage - Defined

• Ford Motor Company – online marketplace

• Lands End– Virtual Models– Online chat

• Educational Institutions– Online learning– Online marketing

Competitive Advantage - Examples

• Consider these technologies -

– Portals (Google, Yahoo, etc.)

– Virtual Worlds– e-Commerce– Web communications (Skype, webcasting)

• Competitive Advantage Videos:– How to Develop Competitive Advantage?– Audi Commercial

Competitive Advantage - Cases

Return on Investment - ROI

A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. To calculate ROI, the benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio.

Link: Return on Investment

Customer Convenience

• Customer (Consumers) are changing all the time

• Organisation's need to change with them• Many people “live” online, so why are

organisation's not meeting them there?• What are some ways that this could

happen?

Demand

• Supplier demand– Automated processes– Time to market– Competition factors

• Customer demand

• Competititor driven demand– we will address this in operational

streamlining

Operational Streamlining• Supply-chain models rely on the Internet to transfer

information electronically, which underpins communication and collaboration between businesses along the supply-chain. Using the Internet in this way has a number of benefits:– saving money and time by removing paper transactions

and speeding up response times– reducing errors in the information passed along the

supply-chain by avoiding re-keying data– improving satisfaction of customers or suppliers with

delivery of information in ‘real time’– integration of dispatch and distribution data with

product development data at each node of the supply-chain, resulting in real cost savings.

Next Week

For this week…

Begin lab 2 and complete by end of Week 4Continue studying for your in-class writing assignment

Complete Lab 3 by the end of the weekContinue studying for your in-class writing assignment