Page 34 - DCAP307_PLANNING_AND_MANAGING_IT_INFRASTRUCTURE

Planning and Managing IT Infrastructure

Notes A thorough SWOT analysis, with participation across the company and across key external
relationships will provide an important building block for the strategic plan. It will be a joint
exercise that yields consensus and a map for predictable performance. Along each step of the
SWOT process prioritise and value each of the items. This will focus the organisation’s attention
and set financial parameters or values that the SWOT analysis represents.

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Caution You can make SWOT a valuable, proven, effective management tool for your
company by following the above few simple guidelines.

Core Competency Analysis

Core competencies are a set of unique internal skills processes and systems that provide
competitive advantage in the market.
A good way to think of core competency analysis is to list the values of both product and
services from the point of manufacturer or distribution to consumption. In what activities or
skills does your company add value better than competitors? Are you better at research,
distribution, marketing or selling? Or perhaps manufacturing? In what functional disciplines
does your company add value for the customer? Core Competency Analysis provides an
opportunity to insightfully look at the skills, processes and systems of the company. The benefit
of the analysis to the company includes the following.
A disciplined approach to identifying those activities that the business must undertake to
compete in the market.

A process for evaluation and prioritisation of the collective know how of the business.
A process for identifying values and prioritising the activities of the business in a way that
lends itself to making strategic decisions on the use of company resources or the need for
new or additional resources.
Core Competency Analysis provides a review format useful in identifying the need for
improvement in key strategic activities, practices and systems. When completed the core
competency analysis separates those strategic functions best done inside the company and those
that are candidates for outsourcing.
The activities kept inside are those strategic activities that the company does extremely well
and, importantly, add real or perceived value to the business and give the business a competitive
advantage.
The candidates for outsourced activities are those that the company does not do particularly
well and add little or no value to the business. Often these activities are candidates to be conducted
by strategic partners or alliances, guided by prescribed directives and managed with mid-level
oversight.
Three important criteria in trying to identify Core competencies include consideration of the
following questions:

Does the activity provide unique or valued potential access to the market?
Does the activity add value to the real or perceived perspective of customer benefits?
Is it difficult for competition to imitate the activity?
In each company or industry there are different sets of core competencies that are important to
the success of the business. In most instances the list of important competencies is relatively
short. However, this short list, when well selected and developed, provides the opportunity to

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