Strategic MIS

Strategic MIS

Q1. Define what a social business strategy is and the most common categories that the social business opportunities fall into.

It is obvious that role of business strategy is very crucial for the success of any business in today's changing business environment. In fact, business strategy can be explained as a process of developing overall business direction that enables a business to prepare long-term plans in order to achieve specific business goals. Similarly, the social business strategy also plays a vital role to direct any organization to run its business using social media and achieve the desired goals. No doubt, the role of technology cannot be avoided from the success of any business as implementation of information technology has brought many benefits to businesses. The emergence of social media has now changed the way business is conducted in modern time.

It would be fair to say that social media has opened new doors of opportunities for business and allows companies to maintain effective contacts with individuals, customers and community through various social networking websites including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. It is important to know that developing a social business strategy is an essential as well as vital management function for today's organizations. It is also important to know that developing social business strategy is not enough and companies should ensure effective implementation of their social business strategy to achieve business goals. The further benefit of social business strategy is that the cost related to social media marketing, customer service, etc is less in comparison of traditional models. It is imperative for CIO or IT Managers to plant social business strategy as an IT capability and organize necessary resources for it.

Q2. Compare and contrast Porter's generic strategies with the dynamic environment strategies.

Researchers argue relationship between organization's position and its environment decides the success in organization's strategy. This means, businesses need to position themselves by leveraging their strengths such as cost advantage and differentiation as described by Michael Porter. In fact, Porter presented three different strategies as a strategic framework that most of the businesses use to achieve competitive advantage. This framework is generally known as porter's Generic Strategies and includes Cost Leadership, Differentiation and Focus strategies. The cost leadership can be defined as strategy of the company to cut its cost at every stage of value chain. This not only allows a company to earn maximum profit by selling products at average industry prices but also enables to lower prices as required by the competitive environment to gain market share. Cost leadership is always developed to target a broad market.

Further, differentiation allows a company to develop a product or service that has unique features in its industry. In other words, the unique attributes of the product allow customers to perceive the product better than others in competition. However, customers always pay a premium in order to avail unique features. This means, Differentiation is not developed to target broad market but more suitable for a particular segment where customers are less ...