Week 2 IT and Business processes

How does technology affect companies' competitive advantage?

• Increase opportunities to extend customer base
• Help firms to connect to customers and suppliers directly
• Giving customers fewer opportunities to switch suppliers
• Make industry competition more intense

Which of the following is NOT in the industry value chain

• Suppliers
• Customers
• The firm
• Regulators
• Distributors

Which of the following is NOT a support activity?

• IT

• Procurement

• Production

• Accounting

The following are network-based strategies, except

• Add a participant to the network for mutual benefit
• create a virtual distribution network
• Use keystone firms to create platforms to be used by smaller firms
• Limit network membership to those with high market power

What is a business process?

• an ongoing collection of related activities that create a product or service of value
• a collection of facts and data for decision-making
• a collection of applications that manage people and processes
• a process that aims at reviewing and improving existing activities

Which are the phases of Business Process Improvement?

• Define

• Control

• Improve

• Measure

• Audit

What can be said about the difference between BPR and BPI?

• BPR focuses on high cost while BPI focuses on low cost improvement
• BPR focuses on incremental redesign while BPI focuses on radical redesign
• BPR tends to have higher success rate than BPI

What is involved in benchmarking?

• Setting a standard to compare against
• measuring your own company's performance
• comparing performance against the standard
• Investigating reasons for discrepancies between performance and standard

Which is NOT a characteristics of IT-business alignment

• Vibrant culture

• Clear goals

• Focusing on customer and supplier relationships

• No executive with IT background on board of directors