Can information technology help a business form strategic alliance with its customers? How?

Yes, Definitely information technology could help a business form strategic alliances with its customers, suppliers, and others . Essentially, Information technology can help a business form strategic alliances with its customers, suppliers, competitors, consultants, and other companies (mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, and virtual companies).These new business linkages and alliances help firms to communicate, collaborate, and share information in ways that were never possible .By establishing strategic alliances, organizations are able to provide better quality products and services to their customers in a more efficient manner, responsive, and flexible manner

yes it is can             .

Thanks for your invitation. I think that IT can help a business form / strategic alliance with its customers but in a limit influence It can show the advance technology of these alliances but they are still needed other contact channels and communications link directly with customers for more understanding and interaction each other to know the new technology utilized updated in the products and services.

My viewpoint that all customers need very close interpersonal relationships and real approach to build up the trusting bridges with these alliances. Most of customers want actual business relationships with the alliances to know further about development of their products and services to be more convinced in the service performance and products quality before any dealing start. IT is not enough to build real satisfactions and mutual collaboration with customers but IT helps to start the link and co-operation to create later-on Business relationships between the alliances and customers.

Thank you sir for this invitation. Your question great... Sure it can help u if u have a good info.tec......where u can convince them and satisfy them and bulid strong relationship with them either, strong competition...

Thanks

Yes, it can .................

No it most certainly can not.

A sound strategic allliance cannot be created without personal contact and personal relationship.  

IT is just a tool, like a pencil and paper.  It might be very useful in helping to create the circumstances for a strategic alliance, and it is likely to be very useful in making that alliance work.  It can certainly be used to strengthen such an alliance. 

Strategic alliances are formed by people looking each other in the eye and trusting each other.  IT can only get in the way of that intangible moment.

 

Information Technology strongly helps in forming strategic alliance with customers. It not only allows collaboration of business but it allows organisation of your work, updating activities and most importantly entering into work with saving environment by limiting usage of papers. It also allows to access historical information in a split of a second. Also, allows to assess the financial aspects and also prepare quick reports for commercial decision making. Which customer has got the patience to wait for long for information?

Strategic Uses of Information Technology. Information technologies can support many competitive strategies. They can help a business cut costs, differentiate and innovate in its products and services, promote growth, develop alliances, lock in customers and suppliers, create switching costs, raise barriers to entry, and leverage its investment in IT resources. Thus, information technology can help a business gain a competitive advantage in its relationships with customers, suppliers, competitors, new entrants, and producers of substitute products. Refer to Figures 2.3 and 2.5 for summaries of the uses of information technology for strategic advantage. in supporting innovative changes in the design of workflows, job requirements, and organizational structures in a company.

Becoming an Agile Company. A business can use information technology to help it become an agile company. Then it can prosper in rapidly changing markets with broad product ranges and short model lifetimes in which it must process orders in arbitrary lot sizes, and can offer its customers customized products while maintaining high volumes of production. An agile company depends heavily on Internet technologies to help it be responsive to its customers with customized solutions to their needs and cooperate with its customers, suppliers, and other businesses to bring products to market as rapidly and cost-effectively as possible.

Creating a Virtual Company. Forming virtual companies has become an important competitive strategy in today's dynamic global markets. Internet and

Building a Customer-Focused Business. A key strategic use of Internet technologies is to build a company that develops its business value by making customer value its strategic focus. Customer-focused companies use Internet, intranet, and extranet e-commerce websites and services to keep track of their customers' preferences; supply products, services, and information anytime, anywhere; and provide services tailored to the individual needs of their customers.

Reengineering Business Processes. Information technology is a key ingredient in reengineering business operations by enabling radical changes to business processes that dramatically improve their efficiency and effectiveness. Internet technologies can play a major role other information technologies play an important role in providing computing and telecommunications resources to support the communications, coordination, and information flows needed. Managers of a virtual company depend on IT to help them manage a network of people, knowledge, financial, and physical resources provided by many business partners to quickly take advantage of rapidly changing market opportunities.

Building a Knowledge-Creating Company. Lasting competitive advantage today can only come from innovative use and management of organizational knowledge by knowledge-creating companies and learning organizations. Internet technologies are widely used in knowledge management systems to support the creation and dissemination of business knowledge and its integration into new products, services, and business processes.

 

there something called business automation solutions , computers mainly created to calculate mathematical and logical formulas to reduce time and to provide accurate results ,then it jumped to the stage of developing software and apps that help in automating any process based on professional system analysis and proper flow charts , nowadays there is a robot replaces the receptionist, it can interact with visitors and guests , so my answer is yes the IT can help , not only help but it will role the business, what about IVR , call centers, Ticketing and help desk systems , queuing system, what about ERP  and managerial systems? sure it will help.

Agreed with answers,

Thanks ...

 

 

 Thanks for the invitation, I  agree with all answers