Integrating It and Business Strategy

Integrating IT and Business Strategy

In the given case, we can see that how the companies like Trans World, P&G, etc. integrated IT strategy with the business strategy and were able to get the outstanding results. Proper implementation of IT strategy has provided competitive advantages to many organizations and has even increased the efficiency of business processes. IT strategy addresses the gap between IT division and other division highlighting an imperative to build out supply of skills and the infrastructure necessary to meet the demands of several divisions of the company (High, 2014). As a result of transformation of IT from support activity to a partner role, companies are likely to face business and political challenges.

Business Challenges

• One of the major challenges is to align the IT functions with the business resources like P&G was reshaping, renaming and refocusing their team after the implementation of IT strategies.
• Determining value in terms of ROI is another big challenge as IT helps in improving the process, decrease processing time, provide innovative services to customers but still at the end all that matters is the high profit and market shares. That is how IT’s contribution to business is measured at P&G which used to be a challenge in the early stage of IT implementation.
• Providing training of new system to the existing staffs as they are already familiar with the existing system. Moving to new system might not be an easy task for everyone, so some of the staffs might show some resistance to change (Barton & Kraus, 1985).
• In Trans World Entertainment, IT staffs spend at least 3 days a year in the field so as to be able to understand various processes of business, that is to say analyzing the business process is one the challenge and the staffs at Trans World are trying their best to overcome it.

Political Challenge

• Internal Resistance: People have access to information and it is not easy for them to change the way things are done due to which they might show resistance to newly implemented processes.
• Improvising the organizational structure which IT executive of Trans World Entertainment was able to do by removing the hierarchy system in the organization.
• Filtering wrong ideas: Most of the ideas sound good but are not feasible. Therefore, it is a challenge to filter those ideas and only adopt the correct ones.

Implications of Shift in the Strategic Outlook of IT for Traditional IT Workers

Information Technology (IT) is no longer just a support service for any business but now it is the cause and the driver for the businesses. Alignment of business and IT is one of the important aspects that the organizations should not ignore. IT has been able to transform the ways of doing business; it’s more like innovating new ideas and improving the business processes. Technologies are helping organizations to adopt strategies and business processes that enable them to reengineer or reinvent themselves to survive and succeed in today’s dynamic business environment (O'Brien & Marakas, 2011).