IT can play a significant role in driving the business forward. Two aspecst of business streategy that are sensitive to IT are cost and complexity. In many cases business strategy is not exucted because it is too costly or too complex. IT can play an important role in bringing forward business strategies that previously were denouned as too costly and complex. Examples of how IT can drive business startegy forward:

  •  Social Computing constructs - the introduction of new collaboration technologies that simplify social constructs at an improved cost are causing business strategies that previously were too costly and complex to re-surface. If before you would need to survey and proactively query users as to what documents are of great interest at the current moment and have human intervention in improving findability, now the same can be automatically aggregated using social tagging and ranking.
  • Team Workspaces - the ability to pivot around a client engagement and orchestrate the engagement and work product. For example: in an audit engagement, the ability to embed the audit methodology into the collection, assembly and approval of work product using document libraries, workflows, task and project management, reporting and all in the context of the client engagement. IT is allowing the company best practice in performing an audit engagment to be replicated to all practitioners.
  • Access Control - the next generation of access control technologies coming from Microsoft ("Geneva") is bound to enable business strategies involing internal & external coordination of group action. For example: an organization boundary may be reshaped by reducing the cost of connecting with external parties whether if it is an outsourced service provider that can accomplish pedestrian task at a great price point or a company partnering up with an entity with certain specialization to win business (technical specilalty or relationship specialty such as reputation). Comapnies may re-shape their organizational structure to better align with market opportunities such as outsourcing tasks that can be better performed by the market and partnering to win business.

Org Boundary

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