Leveraging IT Architecture and Security to Attain Competitive Advantage

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Leveraging IT Architecture and Security to Attain Competitive Advantage

Leveraging IT architecture and security can help organizations have unique advantages over their competition (Armstrong & Taylor, 2014). These policies ensure that organizations remain flexible and reduce their reaction time to changes in technology. They further ensure that organizations harness and exploit the maximum benefits of their IT investment while keeping operation costs low. Organizations can achieve an optimal balance of their capital and labor requirements effectively improving systems and process efficiencies and increase profits. These policies also help reduce operation costs by ensuring that IT investment choices are based on needs and forecasts and not on trends. They also ensure increased synergy of technologies purchased by individual business units, which enhances systems integration. IT ensures that companies have access to current more efficient modes of production. This reduces production costs and cycles, maximizing profits and product quality. Better quality products enhance an organizational image and increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. This translates to increased sales and revenues.

IT architecture, being expensive, fundamental for planning, and decision-making, raises the need to protect their integrity. Security architecture is the measures to ensure the reliability and continuity of such investments and govern their use. They reduce equipment wear and tear reducing maintenance and running costs. They also ensure the safety of organization trade secrets from their competition by removing system weak links. This is mainly through extensive training of system users to avoid unwitting internal system compromise. User training also increases employee health through the proper use of equipment, which reduces running costs by ensuring lower insurance premiums and litigation costs. This also effectively enhances process continuity.

References

Armstrong, M., & Taylor, S. (2014). Armstrong’s handbook of human resource management practice, 13th edition. London: Kogan Page.