Information and competitive advantages

I will reflect on Dr. Roya classes with a bit of extra information. I will discuss on Information and competitive advantages of using HRIS.  "The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people." Tom Clancy quotes this as one who controls information, control people. There is no difference when it comes to businesses. In HRIS we does not only control information, we breakdown the information, process the information, share the information, smoothes the information flows and etc. 

Integrating information technologies into business clearly give the upper hand benefits towards competitive advantage. First it can save cost. By using HRIS we can save cost of any usage of information middlemen, human error, can predict future production and etc. For example consider a computer application that supports job evaluation. Suppose analysts mis-evaluate at least 20 jobs each year due to outdated information. The result is an unwarranted $2,000 annual increase for 10 job incumbents, and it takes two years to discover this mistake. Each mis-evaluated job thus costs $40,000 (10 employees*$2,000 * 2 years), so correcting each misevaluation will save $40,000. We know that a computer application can correct 18 of the 20 mis-evaluated jobs.

Second it can save time. HRIS can reduce the time needed to process the information or transferring information from one department to another, this can be one of the competitive advantage in a sense of serving the customer much more faster. For example, Autodesk, a leading maker of computer aided design software, used to take an average of two weeks to deliver an order to a customer. Now, having installed an ES, it ships 98% of its orders within 24 hours. This saves 13 days of processing data and shipping the parcel, this will be beneficial compared to their competitors, more order can be processed because of the time that ES have cut down significantly. 

Third it can align the process of information flows. From production to marketing to the shipping department the information can be align, less misinformation will occur and all of the order can be processed much faster and accurate.  For example, in Elf Atochem, it tooks four days and seven handoffs between departments to process an order, even though only four hours of actual work were involved. After using HRIS software Elf Atochem has taken full advantage of the system capabilities and able to simplify the flows on information between departments and enhancing customer satisfaction and improve corporate profitably.

There are also 5 competitive advantage in Information System which is cost leadership, differentiate strategy, innovation strategy, growth strategy and alliance strategy.

Sources
Oracle : Information Gives Competitive Advantage

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/siebel/047043.pdf

Cornell University ILR School : Human Resource Information Systems for Competitive Advantage: Interview with Ten Leaders. (Renae F. Broderick and John W. Boudreau 1991)

http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1337&context=cahrswp

Harvard Business Review: Putting The Enterprise into the Enterprise System by Thomas H. Davenport