Business Strategy & why IT folks should care about it.

So, in teaching IS251 here at Loyola, we require students to find and post stories to an online site called Microsations.com. It's a bit like Reddit; they must post a link then have 255 characters to summarize it. I wish I could say this was my bright idea, but it belongs to my colleague, Paul Di Gangi. Ideally, the summary will explain how this story relates the 3 key resources in information systems - People, Information & Technology (at least, according to the text we use). I happen to be a "people, process, technology" proponent, myself. Whatever.

Anyhow, this week students are tasked with finding stories related to business strategy. It's not surprising that they're struggling with this a bit. First off, we have started lecturing on strategy yet. Secondly, they haven't taken a business strategy class yet, either. So, we're seeing lots of stories that are more along the lines of marketing strategies. It's good for me, it will provide many teachable moments. :-)

But, why do we bother even looking at business strategy in an IS/IT course? Well, it's the classic Business-IT alignment argument. And before we can discuss the right IS choices for a firm, we really need to be sure we understand what that firm does - what it aspires to be and how it plans to make money. So, for this course, we focus on Porter's 3 generic strategies (low cost, focus, product differentiation) with some minor variations. We also talk about Value Disciplines from Treacy & Wiersema  as another way of looking at these generic strategies. Where Porter takes a market-centric view in defining his strategies, Treacy & Wiersema shift to a customer-centric focus.

The first lectures will centre around understanding the business so that we can find the appropriate IS solutions to support business goals. This is why I ended up studying in a business school - I'm an IT person who really does think technology is cool. But I recognized that just because something is cool, doesn't mean it's worth spending time or money on, from the organization's perspective anyhow. Technology has to support what we want to do, it has to help the organization deliver on it's strategy in some way be that through reducing cost or opening up new products/services that delight the customer (who will then pay!).