Wednesday, December 5, 2012

BLOG 1 : Information and Competitive Advantages


            In this first meeting, Dr. Nur Naha has touched about HRIS Introduction and Information Systems for Competitive Advantages.  Deliver her lectures in English made me happy because I love learning English (in order to improve my broken English) and after all, it’s quite a long time I didn't use this language.  Besides, what makes this class more interesting was, Dr. will asked us to do short discussion and presentation right after she explain each topic.  I think this is a good way for us to gain more knowledge because we find the information by ourselves and we will more understand the concept and theory.

            From Dr. Naha’s explanation, I can say that information and competitive advantages is about how an organization tries their bests to keep maintain their reputation by having good competitive strategy using the information system.  Nowadays, as we can see there are many competitors in every industry so that the firms have to compete in order to remain competitive in the open market mechanism and for better public-private partnership. Each organization needs to be able to counter any forces that can give effect to company.  For an example, Perodua is an automotive company which vast production base in Malaysia that highly recognized company throughout the country. Perodua has their own competitive strategies to compete with strong international competitor such Honda to sustain fit in industry. 

            Since information technology (IT) plays major role in business to increase process efficiency and improves the communication, we can absolutely see that IT able to links company with the business partner effectively. For example, the network allows company to connect agents, customers and travel service providers, an innovation that allowed it to broaden its marketing range. IT can be used to lock in the suppliers and customers to switch to other competitors. A company leverage investment in IT to create new products. IT provides competitive business by collecting and analyzing information about products, competitors and environmental changes.  After this topic has been explained, my group was presented about e-profile system that has been using by all the government hospitals and other group also shared other system uses by other department like BOMBA n etc.

            Through the lectures, I know that there are five most popular strategies that can be used to make an organization competitive. The five strategies are cost leadership, differentiation strategy, innovation strategy, growth strategy and alliance strategy. Besides these five strategies, there are other strategies that can be used such as rivalry of competitor, new entrants, substitute products, bargaining power of customer and suppliers

            In generally, I understand about most of the company or organizations are using certain competitive strategies to enhance their competition with other organization. The organizations have to use some of the strategies to keep on competing so they will not lose their customer and gain profit. 

            After a brief explanation on that topic where she stressed more on Competitive Forces and 5 Competitive Strategies, we were divided into 4 small groups to discuss about the competitive forces criteria or strategies for the industry given. My group need to discuss and present about telecommunication industry. One of our group members was telling clearly the differences between Maxis (Telecommunication Company that we chose) and U-mobile (as the competitor). I enjoyed the discussion and it helps me to understand more about this topic.

Reference:
3.      Mehdi Khosrowpour, Jan Travers. (2000). Emerging Information technologies for competitive advantage and economic development: 1992 Information Resources Management Association International Conference, Idea Group Publishing
4.      R. Kelly Rainer, Casey G. Cegielski. (2011). Introduction to IS: Supporting & transforming business (3rd edition), John Wiley & Sons Inc.


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