GIS and Organizational & Business Strategies
The use of Global Information Systems have emerged a couple of years ago and many organizations have actually started using it for various reasons. This is one of the major reasons why there is a need to study the major benefits of GIS to businesses and other organizations. Most organizations employ different information systems hoping it would optimize their strategies without even knowing what ISs are and how they work. This paper tackles the major benefits of GIS and how they could help businesses and organizations gain competitive advantage over other companies and enhance their strategic management.
GIS could potentially benefit all types of organizations no matter how large or small they are and no matter what type of industry they originated from. In fact, health organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO, 2012) are already utilizing GIS to provide worldwide and rapid access to various health related diseases and their indicators. This could actually serve as evidence that GIS could indeed improve the employment of strategies to help different businesses and organizations reach their short and long term objectives.
According to WHO, using GIS enabled them to monitor and assess the health trends and situations that relates to various diseases thus, enabling them to act fast whenever discrepancies occur. Since they are a health-related institution, it is important that they provide updated information about current health factors that affects the occurrence rates of diseases in a particular time frame and in a particular location. Without GIS, it would basically be hard for the whole organization to mix everything up since they are also an international company without a fast and efficient way of communication, they will not be able to formulate appropriate business strategies whenever necessary.
Another company that uses GIS to decrease the need to hire a lot of employees is the North South GIS company in New Zealand. They only employed a total of 40 employees to handle different online transaction with their partners around the world (Jackson, 2011). Just like the WHO, NSG NZ actually plans to take advantage of GIS by using it as a tool to improve their business strategy formulation practices—a thing that most organizations take for granted. For an organization to excel, it has to react to certain stimuli that the market and the environment present.
Competitive Advantage
Organizations that are on the same industry could really have a hard time competing with other organizations. Usually, it is a battle about who will be at the top. The ones that are on top are usually the ones who make more sales and money or the ones who gets patronized by their market more. Experts claim that GIS could help organizations make optimal decisions whenever necessary to gain competitive advantage over other organizations. In fact, almost all benefits that an organization could receive by simply using GIS boils down to having a competitive advantage over other organizations.
It would really be hard for a company not to focus on the company’s competitive level because other organizations could easily eat smaller organizations and businesses up especially if they already became so dominant and their growth becomes out of control. Fortunately, there are simple and easy ways to gain competitive advantage over other companies (Laudon & Laudon, 2004) and this again bring the topic about the major benefits of GIS up.
References
WHO. (2012). Global Information System on Alcohol and Health. WHO Website. Accessed February 2012. Available at http://apps.who.int/ghodata/?theme=GISAH.
Jackson, R. (2011). Porirua-based GIS provider opts for onshore cloud services. Computer World Website. Accessed February 2012. Available at http://apps.who.int/ghodata/?theme=GISAH.
Shore, B. (2006). Enterprise integration across the globally disbursed service organization. Community ACM.
Laudon, K., & Laudon, J. (2004). Managing the digital firm. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
