Role of IT in the Democratization of Commerce
The trend in globalization will lead to greater integration of large number of producers and consumers in the global economy according to M. K. Pralahad in his book ”Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid’. IT continues to played an important role enabling democratized commerce.
Because of technological advances; information is getting more and more democratized. Today, on a global scale everyone has access to the same information and the potential to translate that information into intelligence. In the past, the profit was made mainly from ‘Information Arbitrage’. If you had access to privileged information, you could take advantage of that information to make a profit. Also, since information traveled slowly, the first movers had a huge advantage when it came to competition. But, with the coming democratization, the velocity of information has dramatically increased and thus decreasing the period when the organization can market product based on differentiation strategy.
The competition will be able to catch up quickly and offer the same product or service, thus pressurizing the company to reduce cost. This intense pressure from competition leads to ‘commoditization of product/service’ which in turn leads to what Economist call ‘Perfect Competition’. Economists have always loved ‘Prefect Competition’ model because from their perspective that it increases economic efficiency which is good for the society at large.
Thus, trend towards commoditization has accelerated and will continue to accelerate due to technological innovation. This accelerated commoditization which is at the heart of Nicholas Carr’s argument in his infamous HBR article ‘IT Doesn’t Matter’ where he makes an argument that in a ‘perfect competition’ model of future, your investment in IT cannot be leveraged for differentiation strategy.
So, can IT be used for differentiation strategy? The answer is unequivocally YES. First of all, there is always a lag in the availability of information. Even though, the technology continues to enable sharp increase in the velocity of information, the information cannot be made available instantaneously. A ‘business idea’ in an organization will not be known instantaneously to the competition. There is that lag time. But with the increased velocity of information, slow decision will be punished. Organizations need to set up agile business processes and streamline decision making ability if they want to take advantage of first mover strategy. IT can play a major role in this effort only if the core competencies of the organizations are identified and automated.
While the technology can be blamed for commoditizing of products faster, same technology can be leveraged to expedite creation of Network Externalities. Let’s take eBay as an example. While it is simple to copy eBay’s business model, it will be extremely difficult to create a value for the sellers because all the buyers have become eBay’s captive audience. So, in this example IT that enabled Network Externalities has created differentiation strategy for eBay.
IT can also enable seller identify the Long Tail aspect of the supply demand curve. Lets say the Company X is involved in selling music video downloads an specializes in ‘Fusion French Rap with Middle Eastern instruments with Hawaiian Hula dance’. Before large scale global IT adoption, it would have been difficult to identify the demand for that kind of specialized music video. Now, with the advances in IT infrastructure, the company X can reach the global customer base and find enough demand to be profitable. With the advent of social media, technology can be used to build community around that specialized product thus adding more ‘value’.
Thus, IT acts as a double edged sword. On one hand it has the power to force rapid commoditization of products. On the other hand IT can be leveraged as mentioned above to differentiate products and services for an organization. Even with democratized information availability, IT can help create first mover’s advantage. It all depends on how organizations use IT.
Raj Sheelvant is currently working as a Project Manager at a Large Multinational Computer Manufacturing Company. He holds MBA from W.P. Carey Business School of Arizona State University at Tempe, Arizona and MS in Engineering Science from University of Toledo, Toledo Ohio. He has a passion of leveraging IT to create and sustain competitive advantage for the Corporations. He strongly believes that IT can be used to ‘expand economic moat’ for the corporations but one need to make sure that the IT projects are always used to enable corporate and business strategy. He writes his blog on IT Strategy at http://itstrategyblog.com
He is also the author of several papers
“A Parallel Architecture for MUSIC Algorithm.”
International Conference on Signal Processing Application and Technology, Boston-92.
“Hypercube Architecture for Householder Algorithm.” 1992- Modeling and Simulation Conference, Pittsburgh.
You can check his LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/rsheelv