The Impact of Information Technology (IT) Policies and Strategies to Organization's Competitive Advantage (PDF)

Case Study from the year 2018 in the subject Computer Science - Miscellaneous, , course: IT Policy and Strategy, language: English, abstract: The paper aims at reviewing the importance and various aspects of Information Technology (IT) policy and strategy formulation as well as the impacts of IT policy and strategy for competitive advantage in the organization. The paper reveals that information technology which is a vital tool used for a more effective and efficient communication is advancing at a great pace at and poses a great threat to organizations and employees right to privacy. The paper upholds that IT policy formulation is one of the best ways, to ensure effective IT standards, procedures, that protects organizational IT resources and controls information sharing. The article goes further to show how IT strategy formulation helps the organization (using the Information and Communication Technology University as a case study) to achieve its set objectives through policies which control mission-critical activities. The Authors reviewed a total of 23 peer-reviewed articles from prominent journals. The article addressed the following sections: The topic, abstract, introduction, literature review as well as summarized concepts of IT policy and strategy, Importance of IT strategy for business competitive advantage, discussions of organizational IT strategies with case study, impacts of IT policy and strategy on organization, purpose of IT policy and strategy in the organization, summary and conclusions/ findings. The study revealed that IT strategy formulation offers six key advantages which are; Creation of new IT services or products, Improved or quick decision making, Customer and supplier intimacy, Operational excellence, Competitive advantage, and Business survival. The ICT University was used as a case study. The study concluded that IT policies and strategies must align with the organization's vision, mission-critical activities, in order to realize set objectives. It was recommended that any organization that succeed, should first set visions, adopt IT strategies, formulate IT policies in order to have a good sense of business direction for competitive advantage.