Friday, March 9, 2018

How to Leverage IT for Recharging Business Model

The transcendence of information management to innovation management enables IT to help the business recharge business model and build a competitive advantage for achieving long-term business prosperity.

A business model is a way that a company generates revenues and profits. It’s a multi-level, zoom-able schema of how a business or an organization creates, delivers, and captures value for stakeholders, employees, customers, investors or society. When do you use a Business Model? Regularly you use it to review, adapt or redesign the basic building blocks of a business. With rapid changes, a business model is structural and can be both created and changed very quickly. The emerging digital trends bring significant opportunities for businesses to pursue growth through the methodical examination of alternative ways to solve business problems; the abundance of information and the lightweight digital technologies also play the crucial role in recharging business models and renovate traditional organization to reach the next stage of the business development cycle. What are the multitude of influence IT can make to catalyze the business growth, how to leverage IT for recharging business model and accelerate digital paradigm shift?

A business model is a description of the way in which an enterprise intends to make money: Business Model is an entire frame of elements that describe the intents and constraints of a business or organization. Nowadays, information is the lifeblood of the digital organization, information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses, and information management is the linchpin of running a real-time digital business. Therefore, the value of information is not isolated, IT becomes an important element in developing the new business model or renovating existing business model. IT can become known as a revenue rainmaker by associating its efforts directly with sources of income. Digital technologies are creative disruptors, and information provides the very clue for the growth opportunity. Companies are recognizing that IT could become the “magic” behind emerging business models, and it is roughly coupled to the business strategy. Digital leaders can lead boldly and brilliantly imagine the mission and business models of tomorrow if Information Management is managed effectively to unleash the full digital potential. CIOs will contribute to revenue generation when they are part of the senior executives' team responsible for brainstorming business model creation, strategy management, and revenue targets.

Besides its focus on execution, business model needs to allow space for innovation: Information is one of the most crucial soft assets of the business nowadays, IT not only needs to adapt faster within its own department but also needs to accelerate, innovate, and speed up the entire company's digital transformation journey. The strategic value proposition of IT is how to leverage resources and assets of the IT departments to create the optimal business value and contribute to new business model development, for generating new revenue growth, enhancing the business brand, exploring new market or increasing market share. Sometimes when one business area has a new product that can be used by another, IT leaders can connect the wider dots to come up with new innovative solutions. The biggest challenge to business success is IT and IT has to do more with innovation to propel the business growth and profitability. CIOs should think as an intrapreneur and act like a startup manager, communicate with people at the different level of business hierarchy as well as varying sharing holders, business partners, customers, etc, to understand their needs and collect feedback for sparking creative ideas, managing innovation and recharging business model from the business lens.


A strong business model is difficult to copy; it is differentiated in the marketplace: Technology is the disruptive force of digitalization. Technologies can push you out of business if you are not adapt to change your business model. Due to fierce competition, the differentiation provided by innovative technology usually is more long-lived than differentiation provided by marketing actions that can be copied easier. IT is both the building block and the linchpin to connect all important building blocks of a strong business model such as revenue streams, key resources, key activities, key partnerships, cost structure, customer segments, value propositions, channels, and customer relationships. It is a determining factor of success for the business strategy to achieve the fast growth and long-term sustainability of digital organizations. Innovative IT leaders can see things differently either via architecture, customer, process, or disruptive creativity lens, to fill the gap at the big table and contribute to the business model development and strategic planning. Businesses need people who are passionate about exploring the new opportunities enabled by information technology to work at the heart of the enterprise and build a competitive business advantage. From a strategic perspective, IT is the value-added element in developing business models that make the organization different and competitive.

IT is, in fact, the strategic competency of the business. Tuning business model is all about foreseeing and applying trends, that’s where you win the competitive advantage. Business models can be holistically evolved through feedback and probes, subjectively and objective evolved, refined, changed, measured, and then repeated. The transcendence of information management to innovation management enables IT to help the business recharge business model and build a competitive advantage for achieving long-term business prosperity.





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