LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY FOR COMPETITIVE EDGE...

   TECHNOLOGY- A CRITICAL LEVER FOR GROWTH AND COMPETITIVE EDGE..

 Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world – Archimedes

Successful organizations have learnt to leverage the Power of Technology to the hilt and continue to stay ahead  in the race for leadership by innovative and effective use of Technology.
Growth of the use of Technology in Communication, Banking, E-Commerce, Travel, Enterprise Resource Planning, Automating various facets of the company, Marketing have led to tremendous improvements in productivity& profitability for the companies and high value for money for the customers.

While the mobility of the workforce is empowered by the use of mail on the move, tele-presence, live video connectivity and ERP lets organizations manage and enhance productivity in resource utilization most effectively, the most critical use of Technology has been in the field of studying the customers, users, maximising the life time value of the customers , providing enhanced user experience and marketing efficiently to the customers by leveraging the digital media.
The advent of Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture has put the power of technology in the hands of small companies and also reduced the resource requirement for creating  new products and services in the technological domain.
Today small enterprises are able to rapidly develop and test their ideas with limited resources while large organizations are able to quickly deploy IT services within their organizations with a limited investment in hardware and complex appications, thanks to the advantages provided by the Cloud Computing.

Some of the trends in the use of Technology by the thriving companies are as follows:

i) Automation:   Automating various aspects of the operations like manufacturing, service delivery, campaign management, especially the routine and repetitive operations that do not require customer interface will help in reducing operating expenses, enhancing precision and in improving predictability & productivity.
Enterprise Resource planning enables the organizations to leverage technology for most productive management of all resources.

ii) Studying & Analysing Customers:  Technology empowers the organizations with its ability to crunch large amounts of data and make sense for enhancing user experience, getting right products in the right place, improvements required in the delivery of the proposition, cross selling opportunities to enhance life time value of the customers.
With the explosion in the Social media space and tremendous increase in the user generated data globally, the task for today's organizations is not only to keep track of the data but also to make sense of it to help them in getting most value out of it from getting more business point of view and staying ahead of the competition. BIG DATA ANALYTICS is the upcoming area of information processing and knowledge management that is being leveraged the thriving companies in the race for leadership.Big Data Analytics helps organizations in crunching large set of data in a limited time to makes sense of it for productive use. This will help them in studying the customers and operational information at frequent intervals and more widely across the organization ranging from offices,places to plant to customers and also segment and target customers with precision in a more customised manner. This will help the organizations in attaining dramatic improvements in productivity and profitability by helping them to save wasteful expenditure, develop new products as per customer needs at a faster pace, enable cross selling to mine the customers better, enhance customer service levels, increase efficiency and quality of operations by acting on feedback etc..
Keeping track of customers who visit your websites and increasing conversions out of abandoned shopping carts, fans and followers is greatly enhanced by the use of data mining and analysis.

iii) Engaging with the users and the customers: Technology empowers the organizations to engage one on one with their customers and users. Through websites, social media channels, one to one advertising, the organizations are able to reach out to their customers to tailor make their products and services as per the needs of the consumers. Today, tablets are being used at the retail level to give a better idea about the menus to customers and explaining the technical details better at auto showrooms in a comprehensive manner. Augmented reality is being used to leverage multimedia in enhancing visual experience for a better feel of the products and services to the customers. Technology is surely a very big lever in enhancing user experience through innovative engagement techniques.
iv) Marketing and Reaching out to Customers: Technological advances and innovative organizations have enabled marketers and advertisers to precisely segment and target the individual consumers with measured responses that has dramatically improved the effectiveness of advertising and marketing investments. As companies and publishers collect important information like demographics, tastes and preferences, psycho-graphic details  through the online behavioral patterns, about their users, members and we site visitors, the marketers and advertisers are able to deliver targeted campaigns.
Techniques like Email marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Search Engine Marketing Targeted Banner Advertising, Pay per click, Pay per action,Social Media Marketing, On-line Public relations, Video advertising, mobile advertising through the web to targeted customers.
Use of mobile applications to engage with the customers and reach out to them through location based advertising and services has led to micro targeting opportunities.
Affiliate marketing is effectively used by large e-commerce organizations like Amazon to rapidly scale operations across the globe.
Thus the most innovative and technologically pro-active companies are able to converse, engage, empower, entertain their customers on the web thus enhancing their lifetime value for the business.
Technology has empowered the creation of viral buzz that allows good words or bad words to travel fast through reviews, recommendations, mentions in social media, blogs and in media sites. This instantaneous transmission of information and multiplication has helped in creating huge business opportunities and also huge failures. The power of the viral buzz on social media could be gauged by the fact that, this is supposed to have helped Barack Obama in gaining edge in US Presidential Election Campaign-2008 and also in the fall of powerful and autocratic rulers in the Middle Eastern countries like Egypt.

Organizations can also earn substantial additional income by monetizing the traffic that they get on their websites through ad placements, cross promotions etc..
On-line Reputation Management is actively pursued by the successful organizations of the 21st century who monitor the reputation of the company across the important on-line platforms and take action for speedy resolutions of complaints and negative mentions where-ever and when ever they occur.
The increasing pervasiveness of technology in today's operations has also brought along with it, threats related to information security, virus attacks, confidentiality and the need to create backups and safeguards to ward against such lapses. Further inefficient use of technology also brings in duplication of efforts and wastage of valuable resources including time and money.

Hence it is indeed a challenge for today's organizations to manage their digital presence and also to leverage technology to the hilt in making best of the opportunity presented by the ever-changing technology landscape.
This requires the dedication of the top most management and also high quality resources at the senior levels.
Thriving organizations have managed to be always ahead in this aspect of 'Leveraging Technology' for maximum benefit and gaining consumer affinity.