U6 Responses

Instructions:

Response 1.) The section on Business Strategy is extremely interesting to me. It is timely since the company I started with two other founders is going through a significant change related to a difference in business strategy. One of the founders is considering dissolving the company. Still, we have obligations to deliver a product and other commitments to employees that the founder hired as part of his strategy to build infrastructure before receiving funds for the project in question. Now that we have received partial funding, the strategy changed to wanting to build up the team to focus on marketing instead of building the product. The first thing that the other partner and I are doing is to assess the damage before we approach the founding in question with a recommendation on how to resolve our differences amicably.

Artaxerxes sent Nehemiah in to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 2 | NIV Bible | YouVersion, 2011).  The first thing he did was to assess the status of the wall so that he could develop a strategy for rebuilding. Another thing that Nehemiah did was to ask the king for letters to ensure his safe passage and letters to secure the supplies that he would need. This reminded me that in most situations, when developing or changing a business strategy, it is prudent to seek the necessary approvals before beginning the effort. My remaining co-founder and I may need to seek the client’s approval and be transparent about the change in business strategy before approaching the third founder with a recommended strategy for rebuilding the company.

Once Nehemiah started rebuilding the wall, he did so with such a sense of urgency that I am sure he had to ensure all the workers involved bought into his strategy. He pulled a team together from the different families, each building a section of the wall simultaneously. Nehemiah also protected the wall at its weak points while he built it up. Our revised business strategy should also protect the relationships we have built while ensuring the client that we are rebuilding the company correctly, focused on product delivery, and not building out a bloated infrastructure.

References

Nehemiah 2 | NIV Bible | YouVersion. (2011).

https://www.bible.com/bible/111/NEH.2.NIV

Response 2.) In the book IT Implementing World Class IT Strategy, we learned the importance of creating a strategy that breaks down organizational silos (High, 2014). It is essential to align technology with a strategy for competitive advantage. The Harvard Business Review article entitled Six IT Decisions Your IT People Should not Make goes one step further by offering a rubric for the types of decisions that IT departments should not make (Harvard Business Review, 2011):

How much should we spend on IT?

Which business processes should receive our IT dollars?

Which IT capabilities should be firmwide?

How good do our IT services need to be?

What security and privacy risks will we accept?

Who do we blame if an IT initiative fails?

The statements above support the need for non-IT executives to make the decisions about im Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) should be made by those outside of IT. Once the decision is made to implement the systems, then IT should take the lead in assessing the organization, evaluating the best systems, and developing the implementation strategy with buy-in from all the stakeholders.

Benefits of ERP and CRM

In addition to the recommendations above, IT executives may be mindful when implementing enterprise-wide systems like ERP and CRM. When appropriately implemented, these systems can help achieve this alignment. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems provide an opportunity for companies to deploy a consistent technology for resource planning rather than each department using something different or attempting to run the enterprise with spreadsheets or localized project management tools.  The ERP provides one platform for managing finance, HR, supply chain, and manufacturing demand and output on a single platform, creating more demand for system resources (Atieh et al., 2022).

Conversely, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems help employees and the sales team understand customer data and promote more efficient customer prospecting and sales opportunity tracking. Both systems can improve overall efficiency.

Conclusion

ERP and CRM systems provide a unified platform for often disparate systems in the organization. Finance, HR, and manufacturing must share information so ERP systems can provide a single platform for a single source of truth and improve communication so that the departments can work together more effectively. The systems also enforce processes and policies that can make for a more consistent customer experience.

The implementation of ERP and CRM systems also provides IT with an opportunity to understand departmental demands and each department’s internal and external communication needs. This provides IT and the company with a competitive advantage. In the long term, the company has a strategic advantage through improved internal communication and external interaction with customers.