Agile Competitor:
A company with the ability to profitably operate in a competitive environment of continual and unpredictable changes in customer opportunities.

Building a Strategic IT Platform:
Enables a firm to take advantage of strategic opportunities. Typically, this means acquiring hardware and software, developing telecommunications networks, hiring IS specialists, and training end users.

Business Process Reengineering:
The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in cost, quality, speed, and service.

Competitive Forces:
A firm must confront (1) rivalry of competitors within its industry, (2) threat of new entrants, (3) threat of substitutes, (4) the bargaining power of customers, and (5) the bargaining power of suppliers.

Competitive Strategies:
A firm can develop cost leadership, product differentiation, and business innovation strategies to confront its competitive forces.

Creating Switching Costs:
The cost in time, money, effort, and inconvenience that it would take a customer or supplier to switch its business to a firm’s competitors.

Customer-Focused E-business:
Internet technologies enable a company to emphasize customer value as its strategic focus.

Developing a Strategic Information Base:
A firm’s database is considered a strategic resource, which is used to support strategic planning, marketing, and other strategic initiatives.

Improving Business Processes:
By improving operational efficiency, a firm may be able to cut costs, improve the quality and delivery of its products and services, improve operational efficiency through reengineering, adopt a low-cost leadership strategy, and increase quality and service by choosing a product differentiation strategy.

Knowledge-Creating Company:
A firm that consistently creates new business knowledge, disseminates it widely throughout the company, and quickly builds the new knowledge into their products and services.

Knowledge Management System:
An information system that helps knowledge workers create, organize, and make available important business knowledge, wherever and whenever it’s needed in an organization.

Leveraging Investment in IT:
A firm can leverage investment in information technology by developing new products and services.

Locking in Customers and Suppliers:
Building valuable relationships with customers and suppliers, which deter them from abandoning a firm for its competitors or intimidating it into accepting less profitable relationships.

Promoting Business Innovation:
Investments in information systems technology can result in the development of new products, services, and processes. This can create new business opportunities, allow a firm to enter new markets or to enter new market segments of existing markets.

Raising Barriers to Entry:
Technological, financial, or legal requirements which deter firms from entering an industry.

Strategic Business use of Internet Technologies:
The Internet promises to be an attractive and cost-efficient way for many companies to develop strategic collaboration, operations, marketing, and alliances needed to solve and succeed in today’s fast-changing global markets.

Strategic Information System:
Information systems that provide a firm with competitive products and service that give it a strategic advantage over its competitors in the marketplace.

Strategic Roles of Information Systems:
Information systems, which promote business innovation, improve operational efficiency, and build strategic information resources for a firm.

Sustaining Competitive Advantage:
Sustained success in using information technology strategically seems to depend on three sets of factors: The environment, foundation factors, and management actions and strategies.

Total Quality Management:
Total quality management uses a variety of tools and methods to seek continuous improvement of quality, productivity, flexibility, timeliness, and customer responsiveness.

Value Chain:
Viewing a firm as a series or chain of basic activities that add value to its products and services and thus add a margin of value to the firm.

Virtual Company:
An organization that uses information technology to link people, assets, and ideas.