Almost everyone is well aware of the fact that the IT is capable of making maintainable and sustainable competitive benefits. In the business arena, the IT is used through value chain of activities that facilitates the business organization to control and optimize the operational functions for effortless decision making process.

The IT is strategic in it’s skill by building the concept of “Value Chain” in a business o0rganization through generic value activities that are interdependent of each other. This chain comprises elements like customers, suppliers, finance, production, etc. There is a connection between these activities which makes it a value chain. These value chain activities as well as the product’s physical parts and processing is altered either by product differentiation or cutting the costs of the value activities. The IT on the whole even transforms the speed of competition.

The value of the company can be added by the IT either by increasing revenue or reduction in costs. The potential of the IT of adding value to the business firm is very different from being the source of the sustainable competitiveness.

Though, the IT’s ability to be a source of the sustainable competitive advantages is disputed and based on assumptions. The assumptions result in two theories. The correlation between IT and the sustainable competitive benefit is studied by one theory called as the Create capture and Keep paradigm. This basically relies on swapping the costs of the customers.

This theory got replaced by a resource based theory that explicates the company’s potential to use the IT to influence the basic resources as a plus and also source of the sustainable competitive edge. In this theory, when the company possesses similar resources or capability, which the other competitor company doesn’t posses, then the same constitutes as the source of the competitive edge.

But the problem is that, if the resources are constant, then it will be a great disadvantage at the cost of the company. So the same will not make a sustainable competitive edge. Simply by imitation of the IT resources of the successful company without social complexity or ambiguity might also make a sustainable competitive edge.

In any kind of organization, the IT is a potential source of competitive edge in these five methods given below:

• When the supplier is in a good position and the IT is essential and unique for the end users, then the costs borne by the consumers will be switched
• When a technology becomes a proprietary technology
• When the capital Investment in the IT enabled resource increases
• For building the IT application, some technical skills are needed
• When the managerial skills are developed for exploiting and understanding the IT application for increasing the business operations

Each and every kind of information in the firm can get positive results and has the potential to get sustainable competitive edge if you observe the following steps:

1. Assessing the potential and the existing information intensity of the process and product
2. Evaluating the probable impact of the IT on the firm
3. Identifying the rank of the activities that affects the IT first
4. Measuring how the IT can bring new business
5. Generating the action plan by taking advantages of IT

It is not just one supporting system, but also a perfect thought process contributing substantial edge, effects and the implications in the business goals.

However there are dangers in this approach. If responsibility for business equity is shelved onto accountancy teams, other sections will not have an understanding of how their activities can lead to the diminishing or increase in business equity. Ideally everyone should understand their role in developing and maintaining business equity.

The role of individual employees
Individual employees will add value to the company by way of producing goods and service s for sale after mobilizing the inputs. Each person needs to take responsibility to ensure that they do their work to the best of their ability and to the specification that was given to them at the start of their contract. After all if the organization is to collapse, they will be the ones losing their jobs whilst trying to negotiate with unsympathetic venture capitalists. Where there is a need to appraise the company, local members of staff need to cooperate by providing accurate and timely management information in order to facilitate the quick award of funding to the firm.

The Role of the Corporate Finance Team
The corporate finance team is responsible for coordinating all efforts to obtain funding for business projects. Among these sources of funding will be business equity. They will need to assess that the company’s business equity levels are measured, quantified and documented. Furthermore they will be at the forefront of ensuring that in any business deal, the company business equity is not sold way below the market price.

They also need to raise management information for senior managers, prepare reports for potential investors and will be at the forefront of all negotiations. There is also an important role to sensitize the general workforce and senior managers about some aspects of accounting for business equity which may be relevant to their line of work.

The Role of Senior Management Executives
Senior executives will control the overall strategy of the company. If they are not versed with the basic concepts of business equity, they might make management decisions that are inappropriate in terms of trying to build a good business equity portfolio.

Management should also ensure that all parts of the business are aware of the existence of business equity and that all business functions are carried out bearing this in mind the need to maximize business equity. Finally they will be making the final decisions as to whether to agree to any investment proposal so it is imperative that they are quite well versed with the concepts of business equity.

Conclusion
As we can see from the above discussion, everyone working in an organization needs to ensure that they understand that business equity represents the value of their organization and that as they carry out each of their roles, they need to ensure that they consider the ramifications on this metric.

Get ready :
You should have all the financial statements ready and have an effective business plan which should include the purpose, revenue and expense of your company. All personal financial reports should be collected. After all, your creditor will need to make sure that you will be able return back their money, once they have provided you with the loan.

The financial institution will also want to know how you are going to use the loan amount and if you are a small business owner, you will most probably be asked to put collateral. Assets like land, vehicle or equipment can be used as collateral or security. This is because if you fail to repay the loan amount, then your creditors will sell your asset to get their money back.

Instructions :
The first step towards applying for a small business loan is to have all the paperwork including financial statements, cover letter along with purpose of applying for the loan. Your creditor will review and prioritize your application based on your presentation only. It would be wise not to apply to a single creditor only. All financial institutions have different upfront costs and loan rates and therefore, thorough online and offline research is recommended.

The next big thing is to fill out your business loan application completely. Along with the application, you should also attach a cover sheet on which all your company’s vital information should be written. Getting some recommendation letters can also help you in getting the loan faster and easier.

The final step :
After several hours of organizing and complying the paperwork, compare the costs and settle on the best financial institution as per your budget, requirements and preferences. This may seem to be a little bit difficult, but with the right knowledge and resources, the entire process will be made much easier than expected.

If you follow all these steps and take care of all these things, you can be sure that your business loan application is at least not thrown away in the dustbin. Even if some lenders send back your application to you, this does not mean that your application has been rejected. They may just need to know more about your company and your financial information.

Human beings will be at the heart of any business IT project. They will be the working capital that ensures it is commissioned and at the end that it is used for the purpose for which it was commissioned. They will bring their own judgments, skills and failings to the project and could ultimately bring it down.

There is no way of controlling human influence in a comprehensive manner. What managers tend to do is to attempt influence employee action using the various management incentives and sanctions available to them. However this does not always work and could ultimately push the employees even further away from their managers. The basic tenets of good management practice can still apply here. Things such as supervision and reward schemes can counter some of the more negative reactions to new technology.

Where the project has been outsourced, the personnel issues are compounded by the fact the in-house managers really have very limited control on external staff. They will have entered binding contracts with their parent organizations and will really be free to do as they please. They also bring with them their own way of working that may not fit in with the company philosophy. Furthermore they do not bear direct responsibility for things when they go wrong and they have to use faulty technology. This means that they have even less incentive to get it right the first time.

This leads us on to the issue of accountability. This is particularly the case where there is a large organization with different people working on different projects all feeding into one big IT group. This can lead people to view themselves as separate parts of an entity leading to isolation and inconsistencies in practice. Even where problems are being resolved there is no one person who coordinates strategy. Any attempts to get some type of responsibility descend into a blame game. People start going off sick with stress and avoiding the senior managers.

However the biggest cause of failure has to be planning. Many failing organizations have a conceptual idea of what they would like out of their IT project but they will not have detailed plans as to how they are going to achieve the objectives. Commissioning will often be based on the personal whims of a particular manager rather than being an overall long term business strategy. Issues will be simplified with the attitude that they can deal with whatever problems arise on an adhoc basis. Therefore without proper planning the project is almost certainly doomed to fail.

If you have a particularly small business which employs less than 10 people and is primarily based locally, then chances are that you know a lot about your business or if not, just enough to make sure that it doesn’t go under. However if you are running a larger show, you may never be able to understand what goes on in your company and surely that is a recipe for disaster.

It is surprising what can be discovered about your business when you explore the rich world of business process discovery. A tool of the business intelligence model, this process enables you to map the activities of your business and you may even be able to make some improvements. In this article we will highlight some of the basic processes and outcomes involved in the business discovery process (BPD). It is possible to automate the whole BPD process so that seasonal or process variations can quite easily be identified and responsive action implemented with the minimum of fuss.

BPD more often than not is primarily based on the examination of existing data/information gleaned through structured interviews with frontline staff followed by evidence-based verification via management information systems. The latter aspect can be automated depending on the resources available. At this point it is crucial to account for human subjectivity when responding to structured or even unstructured interviews as well as the frailties of memory and bias. Verification via an independent information system will provide an estimate of the reliability of the information that is being gathered.

One school of thought is that the ultimate aim of BPD is to standardize all processes, thereby eliminating the inconsistencies of human influence. Those that believe in this approach argue that computerized processed are less likely to be subject to inaccuracy and what some call noise. Whereas standardization is generally a peripatetic business objective not least because it enables proper performance management, it is also worth noting that without human influence in operations most businesses lose customer service.

The two business resources are complementary particularly when the ultimate goal is good business intelligence. It also adds to other information resources by providing data that is well sourced and subject to referrals as well as revisits of the original data sources.

What happens then when you effectively know about your company or organization? The logical step is to move on to embedding the reports from the BPD into the business intelligence model. A fringe benefit of this is that wastage and duplication is quite easily picked up and management action would presumably follow. It also facilitates the construction of business plans and bids for funding or contracts given the fact that it is actually a detailed description of what the organization actually does. So, challenge yourself and understand your business. You never know you might like it.