Week 1: Business basics Business components: - Types of business such as sole proprietorship, partnership and corporation. - Business models which encompass the activities performed by a company to create, deliver and generate revenue or other benefits. - Porter's Five Forces model, which is a model for analysing the competitive forces that shape and influence a company's potential for profitability as well as its attractiveness in industry. o The five forces comprise: " intensity of competitive rivalry " threat from new entrants " threat from substitutes · bargaining power of buyers · bargaining power of suppliers. - Value chain analysis (also created by Porter), which is a business tool to identify processes in which a company can 'add value for the customer and create a competitive advantage for itself, with a cost advantage or product differentiation. Business information systems: - eCommerce: The buying and selling of products and services over the Internet. - eBusiness: The conducting of business on the Internet including buying and selling, serving customers and collaborating with business partners. - mCommerce: The ability to purchase products and services through a wireless internet-enabled device. Frameworks for benchmarking competitive advantage: - SCM: the active management of supply chain activities to maximize customer value and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. - CRM: involves managing all aspects of a customer's relationship with an organization to endeavor to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organization's profitability. - ERP: integrates all departments and functions throughout an organization or enterprise into a single IT system to enable decision to be made by viewing enterprise-wide information on all business operations.
Week 2: Competing in the information age The traditional organisational structure is represented by the following four segments from the bottom (largest) to the top (smallest): · Customers (bottom) · Process people · Middle management · Top management. (top) The newer organisational structure is represented by the following four segments from the top (largest) to the bottom (smallest): · Customers and clients (top, biggest) · Frontline employee team · Team leaders and management · Top managers. (Bottom, smallest) Planning/Developing a set of requirements/Talking to the business: Requirements should start with the business objectives, and then refine these objectives with tighter specifications of what the business expects, what users expect, and any constraints that will be imposed on the designer. The requirement itself will be expressed in very different ways at different levels within the organisation. High level At the board level, For example, the finance director may have his or her own the requirement may simply be to increase adoption of client/server technology over the next three years to gain competitive advantage and achieve best practice. While this may be the ultimate truth for a senior executive, it means very little to technical Medium level requirement: to sustain a 35 percent return on investment while minimising capital expenditure within this fiscal year. The admin manager may also have some requirements for specialised equipme nt to also reside on the business network, like EFTPOS machines,