Enabling Success

Presented By Group-6
ABHISHEK VERMA
NIKITA RANJAN
SUMEET AGARWAL
MD. FAHAD KHAN
PRARTHANA BIHARI
 Enabling success
Enabling success is concerned with the two way relationship between overall
business strategies and strategies in separate resource areas such as people,
information, finance and technology.
 Managing people
• The knowledge and experience of people can be the key factors enabling the
success of strategies.
• But they can also hinder the successful adoption of new strategies too.
• The relationship between people and successful strategies goes beyond the
traditional agenda of the HR function and is concerned with behaviors as much as
competences.
 People as resource
The traditional HR activities can help enable successful strategies in the following
ways:
• Audits to assess HR requirements to support strategies and/or identify people
based core competences on which future strategies might be built.
• By goal-setting and performance assessment.
• Rewards for team work
• Recruitment is a key method of improving strategic capability in many
organizations. Redeployment and redundancy planning are important in all
organizations facing change. Succession planning is important for future
leadership.
• The existence of uniquely competent individuals in an organization will not be a
robust source of long-term strategic advantage .
• Training and development are also important factors for enabling successful
strategies of any organization.
 People as behaviour
People’s behavior is an area where the day-to-day actions of individual managers
can contribute significantly in enabling the success of business strategies. For this
they need to understand the relation between their action and organization’s
strategies. Like:-
 Seeing their role as people-oriented ‘shapers of context’ and not just as
analytically driven ‘master planners’.
 Understanding the relationship between behavior and strategic choices.
 Being realistic about the difficulty and time scales in achieving behavior
changes.
 Being able to vary their style of managing change with different circumstances.
 Teams in organizations must be capable of operating different styles
simultaneously.
 Organising People
Some of the implications how people might enable strategic success in the modern
world are :
A. The HR function
There are four broad roles that an HR function could fulfil in enabling successful
business strategies:
• As a service provider to line managers who are carrying the strategic responsibility
for the HR issues.
• As a regulator ‘setting the rules’ within which line managers operate
• As an advisor on issues of HR strategy to line managers ensuring that HR policies
and practice are in line with the best organisational practice.
• As a change agent moving the organisation forward.
B. Middle (line) managers
• Whether it is realistic to expect line managers to be competent HR
professionals.
• The short-term pressures to meet targets do not help line managers in taking a
more strategic view of people-related issues. Downsizing and delayering have
left the remaining managers too busy.
• Trade unions and professional associations have tended to resist a dispersion
of responsibility for HR strategies.
• Managers may lack the incentive to take on more of the formal HR activities,
either directly in their pay or grade or indirectly in their judgement as to
which competences make them more marketable outside the company.
Implication for managers
• There must be activities to ensure the maintenance of
competitiveness.

• There must be activities to provide a platform on

which new strategies can be built in the longer term.

• These two ‘cycles’ of activities must be linked.

Achieving short-term delivery goals must not be at the
expense of longer-term capability.

• Those organizations that are competent in managing

these processes are likely to gain competitive
advantage. Others run the risk of failing to deliver
successful business strategies.
Managing Information
The tacit knowledge embedded in
organizations is difficult to capture yet is
usually the basis on which competitive
advantage is built. The three main connections
between information, IT.

• information and strategic capability

• information and changing business models

within and across industries and sectors.

• information and structures/management

processes
 Information strategies can have a profound influence on creating and destroying
the core competences that underpin competitive advantage.

Information and product/service features

The enhanced capabilities of IT are already enabling organisations to provide

product/service features that are valued by customers:

• Lower prices (through reduced costs) – particularly where the product is

information, such as in financial services.

• Improved pre-purchase information (e.g. website browsing, customer bulletin

boards).
 Continued……
• Easier and faster purchasing processes (e.g. online ordering) and delivery. This can
allow customers to move closer to just-in-time with their business processes.

• Shorter development times for new features. These, in turn, might give purchasers
advantage with their customers.

• Product or service reliability and diagnostics are being improved (e.g. engine
management systems in cars).
• Personalized products or services are increasingly being offered without price
premium (e.g. customizing computer architecture for each purchaser).

• Improved after-sales service can be provided by better information systems (e.g.

automatic service reminders).
Information and competitive performance
Customer expectations of service standards become the universal benchmarks
crossing all industries and public services.
One of the most important implications of the IT revolution is competitive
advantage is more likely to be achieved through service performance than in
product features per se. So managers need to conceive of their business not as a
product company with support services but as a service company which supplies
a product.
Competitive advantage might be gained by organizations that are able to use this
capability to build a much more detailed knowledge of the market.
Information and robustness
• A resource or competence might be rare.
• Core competences may also be difficult to imitate because they are complex.
• Core competences may be robust because of causal ambiguity – competitors find
it hard to understand the reasons why an organisation is successful.
Information and competitive strategy

The role of information in enabling different competitive strategies is :

• Routinization - where the role of information, usually through IT systems, is to
reduce drastically the cost of transactions with customers, suppliers or channels.
• Mass customization – where information systems can create more product features
that are valued at the same or lower price.
• Customization – where information can be provided to customers in advance of
any face to face or telephone contact, which is reserved for advising a much more
knowledgeable potential customer.
Information and changing business model
A business model describes the structure of product, service and information
flows and the roles of the participating parties.

• replacing physical or paper-based processes

with electronic processes.

• By significantly extending the functions that

traditional business models can offer.

• Models which are transformational in the

sense that business can only be done this way
electronically. The most well-established
example of transformational changes is the
information brokerage role of companies like
Yahoo! or Google with their search engines.
 Information and structuring
Improvements in information processing capability are making a significant
contribution to better ways of organising. But how information is managed needs to
fit the organisational approach and vice versa.
• Organisations configured as a centralised bureaucracy must deliver routinised
business processes, which reduce cost whilst maintaining threshold quality levels.
• At the corporate centre of highly devolved organisations there is less concern with
complex coordination and a requirement for accurate and timely information about
the performance of business units against pre-agreed targets. This is the core of the
relationship between the corporate centre and the business units.
• Better information can allow managers and external stakeholders to bypass some
of the traditional gatekeepers, who gained power from their control of information.
 There are three broad issues that organizations of all
Managing Finance types face
1. Managing for value :- this is concerned with creating
value for shareholders or ensuring the best use of
public money, is an important consideration for, and
responsibility of, managers.

2. Financial expectations :- The financial expectations

of stakeholders will vary – both between different
stakeholders and in relation to different strategies.
This should influence managers in both strategy
development and implementation.

3. Funding strategies:- The nature of the funding is

appropriate for the type of strategy – and vice versa.
This is concerned with balancing business and
financial risks.
Managing Technology
A technological path identifies the major factors that are influencing technological
developments.
• Supplier-dominated developments – such as in agriculture, with advances in machinery,
fertilizers and pesticides. The strategic issue for an agricultural producer is rapid learning on
how these new technologies might transform business processes in ‘their’ part of the value
network.
• Scale-intensive developments – such as complex manufacturing systems in automobiles and
other sectors – where advantage is gained from economies of scale and learning results
from that scale.
• Information-intensive developments – such as in financial services, retailing or travel –
where the exploitation of IT is the central strategic issue.
• Science-based developments are still important in many sectors such as pharmaceuticals,
electronics, materials and engineering. The strategic challenges are to monitor academic
research, develop products and acquire the resources to achieve commercial-scale
production.
Technology and the competitive situation

• Barriers to entry for potential new entrants may be lowered by reducing the
economies of scale. In some cases, barriers may be raised as technologies become
more difficult to master and products more complex.
• Substitution may be assisted by technology at several levels.
• The relative power of suppliers and buyers can also be changed by technology.
• Competitive rivalry amongst organizations can be raised through this process of
generic specifications or diminished if one firm develops a new product or process
which it is able to patent.
Technology and strategic capability
• To tie future developments to a single technology that an organisation has mastered can
be both inappropriate and unduly risky.
• Core competences may be found in the processes of linking technologies together rather
than the technologies .
• Dynamic capabilities may be important in a rapidly changing and competitive world.

Enabling processes
Some of the following processes may be of crucial importance in enabling
success through technology:
 Scanning the business environment (both technology and market
developments) and spotting the opportunities for gaining advantage and the
potential threats to current business.
 Resourcing developments adequately, but not over-generously, so as to ensure
a good return for the investment.
Developing or acquiring technology

• In-house development may be

favored if the technology is key to
competitive advantage and an
organization has expectations of
gaining first-mover advantages.
• Alliances are likely to be appropriate
for ‘threshold’ technologies rather
than ones on which competitive
advantage is to be built.
• Acquisition of current players or
rights may be particularly appropriate
if speed is important and there is no
time for learning.
INTEGRATING RESOURCES