Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Positioning leads to higher levels of revenue through increasing the size of the market, retain-
ing the first-time customers, increasing the size of the wallet share, and so on. Positioning has to
do with factors such as
◾
Understanding customer needs
◾
Understanding competitor initiatives
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Determining the businesses' financial needs
◾
Conforming with legal and regulatory requirements
◾
Conforming with environmental constraints
The capability/capacity has to be aligned with the positioning or else it has to be changed to deliver
the positioning. Capability/capacity has to do with internal factors such as
◾
Key business processes
◾
Procedures and systems
◾
Competencies, skills, training, and education
The key is to have a perceived differentiation of being better than the competition in whatever
terms the customers choose to evaluate or measure and to deliver this at the lowest unit cost.
7.1.3 Enterprise Agility
The difficult challenges facing businesses today require organizations to be transitioned
into flexible, agile structures that can respond to new market opportunities quickly with a
minimum of new investment and risk. As enterprises have experienced the need to be simulta-
neously efficient, flexible, responsive, and adaptive, they have transitioned themselves into an
agile enterprise with small, autonomous teams that work concurrently and reconfigure quickly
and adopt highly decentralized management that recognizes its knowledge base and manages
it effectively.
Enterprise agility is the ability to be the following:
1.
Responsive
: Adaptability is enabled by the concept of loosely coupled interacting components
reconfigurable within a unified framework. This is essential for ensuring opportunity man-
agement to sustain viability.
The ability to be responsive involves the following aspects:
a. An organizational structure that enables change is based on reusable elements that are
reconfigurable in a scalable framework. Reusability and reconfigurability are generic
concepts that are applicable to work procedures, manufacturing cells, production teams,
or information automation systems.
b. An organizational culture that facilitates change and focuses on change proficiency.
2.
Intelligence intensive
: That manages and applies knowledge effectively whether it is knowledge
of a customer, a market opportunity, a competitor's threat, a production process, a business
practice, a product technology, or an individual's competency. This is essential for ensuring
innovation management to sustain leadership.
