Enterprise Architecture

Competitive Advantage & EA

Extract from a paper presented by Dennis A Stevenson to the Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town , in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Commerce in Information Systems, June 1995. Copyright subsists in this material.

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Competitive Advantage & EA

During the 1980’s it was a widely held belief that companies had to choose either a low-cost producer strategy or a differentiation strategy, in order to gain competitive advantage. (see Porter, 1985)

“Another strong belief that melted under scrutiny was that we had to choose between a proprietary, differentiated product strategy and a low-cost producer strategy. This either/or choice has proven to be a false and misleading alternative for many U.S. companies.” (Stata, 1989)

Mass Customisation

Mass customisation has enabled it’s adherents, to achieve low costs, high quality, and the ability to make highly varied, often individually customised products.

“To achieve successful mass customization, managers need first to turn their processes into modules. Second they need to create an architecture for linking them that will permit them to integrate rapidly in the best combination or sequence required to tailor products or services.” (Pine, Victor & Boynton, 1993)

Product Differentiation

“Reducing product development cycle time is emerging as a cardinal concern for the nineties. The infectious demand for producing new products faster will require more companies to adopt a fast-cycle- time strategy.” (Meyer and Purser, 1993).

In a company where the information content of the product is high, a well designed Enterprise Architecture automated in a componentised way can allow product differentiation to occur at low cost.

Some of the desired benefits from a re-engineered product infrastructure and process are listed by McNabb (1994):

The most dramatic benefit would be a greatly improve market response time. This means knowing what the market wants and being able to either make product changes or deliver new, customised, innovative products without modifying systems or operations.
Providing for future flexibility, consolidating multiple product marketing and administrative systems and providing better feedback on customer needs.
Reducing administrative, product development, and system maintenance costs.
Reducing or eliminating manual, exception, and error correction procedures.

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This page is maintained by Dennis A Stevenson who can be reached at dstevens@aztec.co.za.

This page was last updated on July 15 1995. Although we will attempt to keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided. Users are advised to look at our disclaimer .

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