The Business Benefits of the New IT

Businesses can benefit if IT services can be easily reused and applied to any business problem, opportunity, or innovative idea. For example, imagine that a large retail corporation is looking for new ways to create innovative partnerships that will allow the company to leapfrog competition. Retail is a highly competitive market with low margins. It’s difficult to differentiate one company from another. Simply being the low-cost provider will not support growth. The company decides that as a differentiator, it must introduce innovation on various levels:

1. The company decided that it would enhance its e-commerce site by providing customers with the ability to customize each outfit based on their different needs.

It, therefore, leveraged imaging systems so that customers could order outfits based on their exact measurements. To accomplish this, the company had to do the following:

a. Partner with an imaging technology company

b. Modify its supply chain to create a system that could synchronize how much merchandise is ordered through a new on-demand consumer model

2. To be successful, the company needed to implement new business rules that governed how and when it purchased merchandise based on the level of orders and customer preferences.

This business model hadn’t been tested before, and thus was risky.

3. The company decided that it needed to experiment with many different go-to market strategies that would require a highly tuned ...

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