Make or Buy IT Solutions?

In today’s world of extreme competition IT has been acting as a game changer and is helping in creating success stories all over the world. But this success doesn’t come free of cost. Creating an IT enabled environment in a company may cost a fortune to it. Also the success of doing such a BPR activity inside an organization is not guaranteed. This leaves the companies with very few alternatives – Whether they should form an IT department and handle all the IT activated through it or whether they should outsource their IT activities to other companies which have been operating in the IT domain since ages.

Gone are those days when companies used to have an in-house IT team which used to work on developing systems which were unique in nature and helped them to drive their top line by automating their processes. High capital expenditure was a mandatory for such companies because they had to operate and maintain a large number of servers, software, hardware and human resource.

Today, we are witnessing a world of outsourcing – a world of specialization. We are living in a world where acute competition is eating into the revenues of companies. In order to minimize their operational costs companies have started to outsource the non essential activities to other companies which are having some expertise on the same. C. K. Prahalad’s theory of core competency also talks about it. It says a company should concentrate on the thing which it does best and should outsource the other activities. For eg most of the telecom majors of India like Airtel and Idea have outsourced their IT activities to IBM.

Companies today focus more on proper branding and marketing of their products. They rely heavily on three things –

1) Finding a gap in the market

2) Forming an impression of their product on the prospects mind

3) Ensuring that proper quality initiatives are taken up by the vendors which further leads to good quality products

So our mantra for various companies (especially SME’s) is that they should back their area of expertise by focussing its resources on it and should let go of the activities which do not add much value to its product.

Simply Complex!!!

Techspell!!! Any layman’s first impression for this word would be, spelling the technology. Indeed it is!!! Let me begin with the spelling of T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y. 

The Educative Creative Hypnotic Notion of Operating Logic of Overall Globe around You. 

Well you can make yours!!! But the key point is, almost everything around us is a result of technology. Technology enjoys the benefit of possessing the widest range when it comes to level of complexity, it can be the most simple technology like “See-saw” (remember the class 7 physics) to Rocket science (most of us don’t even know it, and that’s why we make a scary face while speaking “ROCKET SCIENCE”- “indeed a heavy phrase”)

So out here, on this platform, I am taking up the free honor to define technology in all new dimension. I am gonna challenge your intelligent but dormant brains, and ask you a very simple question, “Which is the most simplest technology which is being used daily in our normal day to day life according to you??”

For me its The Toothbrush!!! Lets see how much you can innovate and come up with something different indifferently!!!  

Remember… “It’s not ROCKET SCIENCE!!!”.. So " KEEP IT SIMPLE SILLY"

Positioning for Technology Products

In today’s world of innovation where the sole motto of companies is to ‘Innovate or Die’, it is becoming difficult for companies to proliferate their technology into the markets. Users today are being bombarded with numerous choices and are facing difficulty in selecting the best alternative. Though many small companies are competent enough in the field of technology,they still lack a good marketing base. This is precisely the reason why many good products do not succeed in the market. Therefore, some of the smart organizations like Cisco and Nike are and for quite some time have been outsourcing their production to developing countries while dedicating their resources to focus more on the marketing aspect. Going by C.K.Prahalad’s Core Competence Theory, we can say that in today’s world marketing can be considered to be a core competence. A company can use this to create a sustainable advantage for itself over other organizations.

A company often tries to position itself by creating a desired image for itself as well as its products in the minds of its consumers. This positioning plays a very significant role when it comes to high tech products. Microsoft and Apple are both billion dollar brands, this is because they have been positioning themselves in such a way that they have maintained their status as top of the mind brands.

Traditional methods of segmentation are inappropriate for high tech product manufacturers because these procedures are designed for markets in which a marketer can easily identify and gather extensive quantitative and qualitative data on the appropriate industry and the customer group which is interested in its product or services.

There are several reasons as to why high-tech companies face difficulty in marketing their products. First, technology changes at a rapid rate which keeps these companies on their toes because. This is necessitated by their need to remain updated in order to stay ahead of their competition. Second, it is difficult to find buyers who are ready to accept new technology. Third, many companies do not have clarity of vision, due to which they allocate there resources to filling a small gap existing in the market. This seldom, provides them with a sizeable market and often drives them into an economic crunch.

Market positioning is a concept which can be of boundless use for the high tech companies. In order to be fruitful, a company must differentiate itself and its products from all others, thus attaining a unique position in the marketplace. If marketers themselves cannot segregate their products from those of their competitors, then how can they expect their customers to do so?

Marketers should follow the pull model of new product development. They should appreciate the demands of their customers and then onward this to their R&D team which can then devise a product which will inevitably be a close match to the customer’s requirement. The success for High Tech companies lies in connecting their customers to their R&D activities. This ensures that the product is positioned on the terms of its prospective use.

Thus we can identify 3 I’s which are essential for the success of companies which are technology oriented. They are:Innovate, involve customers and identify the gap and position accordingly.