IT and Competitive Advantage

What exactly a competitive advantage is.

Having the competitive advantage answers the question; What are you best at? Making that skill IT provides varying level of returns based on your business. The closer your business is to being integrated into a computerized structure the higher the returns for investing in IT.

Companies such as Amazon, Google, Go Daddy, and online content providers benefit the most from investing in their information tech because their product is facilitated by their technological infrastructure. For example, while amazon is a dominating leader in the online world as a market place of products, they have gained the competitive advantage by investing in their domain hosting, and server facilitation business. By investing into costly SSD enabled servers they have achieved the noticeable advantage of being able to find your query of either a listing of a product or searching your database they may host much faster with better Information technology. Their business model is built around playing to this competitive advantage and it is no wonder how they are able to expand their business to a town like Murfreesboro. This has proven to be extremely beneficial for bringing jobs to our community despite many investments in IT focused on outsourcing call centers and other likely cost cutting measures.

It's clear that not every business will be as benefited as an online giant. On another note, a company wishing to expand into other markets would benefit an investment in IT. Let us consider a company established on the west coast such as an accounting firm. To expand his market he might consider a host of marketing, office space, or because his business relies so heavily on data storage and referencing his system for reporting needs, he will likely utilize teleconferencing, or an advanced database such that his associates and he can access full records for customers and businesses.

To bring it down another level, a small business can gain strategic value over its immediate competitors by investing in, let's say, a Dropbox teams account allowing the business to sync, save, and use content wherever any part of the team may be. This allows a small investment to go a long way to putting everyone in the business on the same page. Imagine a screen printing company that employs fewer than five hourly employees access to order forms, inventory lists, or production level designs regardless of what wireless device they may use. So their IT investment consists of a tablet and the Dropbox service, and document dedicated printer. The savings from hard copies of all the documents, records storage, and only printing them as needed infers office supply costs are kept to a minimum and goes a long way to giving them a lug up on local competition.

Perhaps the most relevant and important IT solution that all business need is simply a website. A dedicated web designer can pay off in a very short term. Keeping in mind our screen printing service, an online market to show the almost infinite possibilities of their wears shows the character of the business. One site comes to mind as a similar example. The costs associated with investing in IT have shrunk significantly over time such that any company can gain from the investments. As an online provider google has some relevant tips to make a small business website work best for you.

Gaining an advantage may be hard with so many competitors, but by comparing to those at your regional level you don't miss the forest for the trees.

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