IFSM Stage 2 Assignment

June 30, 2020

Stage 1: Strategic Use of Technology

Introduction

Even after the concept of disruptive innovation had been discovered in the management realms, companies persist with the obsolete practices, old processes with no tools infused with the relevant data to respond to the contemporary demanding talents. Maryland Technology Consultants, Inc. has found itself in the middle of this challenge since its inception in 2008. As testified by the organizational leaders in an elaborate and responsive interview conducted to ascertain the level of the challenge, in particular, the CIO of the company Raj Patel suggests that even with a better understanding of the company's entire architecture and strategy, more critical work is still necessary. This critical work is the establishment of a modern-electronic hiring system that is compatible with the existing architecture to meet the growing demand in the market with regards to the consultancy services offered by the company. It is therefore the main focus of this Business Analysis and System Recommendations report. In stage 1 of this report, the main theme covered in response to the MTC hiring deficiency is the strategic use of technology. In this, an extensive and informative debate is curved around; business strategy, competitive advantage, strategic objectives, and the decision making dimensions within MTC and with regards to the challenge in questions.

A. Business Strategy

Within the current manual hiring procedure, the MTC business strategy is curved to offer super consultancy and recommendations to the customers. To achieve this approach, the company must, first of all, ensure that they have highly knowledgeable and experienced consultants that can improve and maintain at a high level the competitive advantage of the business. MTC has invested in employees who are abreast of the cutting edge concepts of business and technological themes and the best practices to monitor the business growth.

Achieving this strategy will require MTC to establish a system that would be more responsive at departmental levels and facilitate the quick hiring of IT consultants. This is the major issue presented by the current manual process that can hinder the company from achieving the business strategy. Bring an entire confluence of technology to this system would mean that a faster and more responsive electronic interface compatibly put in place to help the company compete. The new system will not only ensure that the appropriate talent is captured to fulfill the company’s current and future contracts but also ensure that a SaaS solution is adopted to leverage on the industry best practices at low costs. It will also solve the challenges resulting from their distributed operations worldwide. Finally, it will facilitate the satisfaction of clients by matching the best skills with the contract and ensure that profound security measures are in place to control and protect the access of the customer's data (Buorgeois, 2020).

B. Competitive Advantage

Currently, MTC is operating in a very competitive ecosystem with both huge and small IT consulting firms curving their niches to survive. The major rivals in this environment are Hewlett-Packard (HP), Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Also, smaller companies are making strategic entries into this environment to compete with robust sets of skills, market segments, and established customer bases. MTC has in the current sense started to assess the best position for itself by agitating for adoption of an e-hiring platform that will leverage on its current architecture with much flexibility and agility of delivering consistently high-quality services to its customers. Also, the company is planning on including some skilled consultants in other countries to offer remote research and assessment support to its onsite team in the US. This will ensure that the company acquires the vantage position in this competitive IT consulting sector.

C. Strategic Objectives

With regards to the future strategy and competitive environment the company operates in, MTC must work on ensuring a diverse set of skills very efficiently, to capture various niches in the market and a wide customer base for their competitive advantage.

D. Decision Making

Current a decision has to be made on how to ramp up the hiring process and fill the requirements of the two new contracts that would enable the company continuity and growth into other contracts awarded in the future. The ever-growing number of contracts has outpaced the human resource, therefore the leadership must succinctly decide based on the best interest of the customer and company's growth (NPI Technology Management, 2020). That is why the recommendation of a commercial off-the-shelf software product has been seen as the best option to confluence and dramatically transforms the hiring process, cut on time costs, and the general costs of hiring employees.

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