In a business environment of constant change and need for renewal, Information Technology (IT) plays an integral part in moving companies forward with their e-Business initiatives. Below are a few strategies that are key to succeeding in the new electronically-engaged world of business.
E-Business
- Maintain strong leadership.
- Analyze your business strategy.
- Analyze your e-Business strategy.
- Create the content – setup your online presence in its full functionality.
- Enrich the content – create value for your customers.
- Extend the content – reach out and touch your customers (get to know them, and have them get to know you).
- Function in Internet time – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
- Perpetually support your customer base by listening and reacting to their needs/concerns.
E-Commerce
- Specify the goals – which customers, how much commerce, how much revenue, in how much time, with how much cost.
- Have a contingency plan.
- Have good metrics on your goals.
- Leverage your site – most of the value of e-Commerce is the information it generates, so use this information to analyze, strategize and implement your initiatives.
- Get customer participation – make your site part of their business so they do not want to switch to a competitive site.
- Protect your customer’s privacy – with each customer have an agreement on what may be shared, when, and with whom.
- Protect your site from security attacks – internally (have a need to know basis for access to the site) and externally (have a firewall to the Internet and to your Intranet).
- Backup everything – backup each server/data three times over.
- Don’t stand still – re-evaluate the success of the system weekly by analyzing trends and traffic patterns.
- Budget for the next project based upon the previous item.
Knowledge Management
- Share knowledge and best practices.
- Instill responsibilities for knowledge sharing.
- Capture and reuse past experiences.
- Embed knowledge in products, services and processors.
- Produce knowledge as a product.
- Drive knowledge generation for innovation.
- Map networks of experts.
- Build and mine customer knowledge bases.
- Understand and measure the value of knowledge.
- Leverage intellectual assets.
IT Project Guidelines
- Have a clearly defined goal – explicitly identify what you want to accomplish.
- Define the problems that will be solved.
- Understand the boundaries on your solution – what can be done as well as what can’t, are their restrictions due to existing infrastructures/architectures/processes.
- Know what is in place today in terms of software, hardware, services, off-the-shelf and custom services and applications.
- Know what works and what isn’t working and why.
- Who are the users, and how will you capture their requirements and prioritize them.
- Develop methods to discover if your users are satisfied.
- Stick to a plan.
- Document features/functions/priorities.
- When working with vendors and solution providers, verify, verify, verify – make sure their solution is designed to address your problem in a costly and effective manner.
Being an Effective Information Technologist
- Study the corporate culture.
- Understand the business model.
- Build relationships with fellow executives.
- Establish credibility first through small changes.
- Build a personal board of directors.
- Talk and listen.
- Be accessible and responsive to users.
- Set realistic goals.
- Take inventory of the technology.
- Assess your IT personnel.