Joe Bryan
Rob Pimentel
Chapter 1 Case Study 1-1

Discussion Questions:

1.) How does the business strategy affect information systems and organizational decisions?

A business strategy is a well-articulated vision of where a business seeks to go and how it expects to get there. Management constructs this plan in response to market forces, customer demands and organizational capabilities. The business strategy drives the decisions made by organizations and IS regarding the structure, hiring practices, applications, hardware and tactics.

Organizational capabilities include the skills and experience that give the corporation a currency that can add value in the marketplace. The leaders of the organization must construct a plan to best utilize organization assets to work towards the business strategy. The documented plan must apply human and capital resources to objectives and timelines that clearly map to the business strategy.

IS strategy can affect and is affected by changes in a firms business and organizational strategies. IS strategy always involves consequences – intended or not – within business and organizational strategies.

2) What generic strategy does Roche appear to be using based on this case? Provide a rationale for your response.

D’Aveni identified four arenas in which firms seek to achieve competition advantage under hypercompetiition: 1) Cost/quality, 2) Timing/know-how 3) strongholds and 4) Deep pockets.

Roche became hypercompetitive by learning to “Fail Fast, so you can succeed sooner.” By performing a massive number of tests very rapidly, Roche could identify those compounds that looked promising very quickly and reject those that don’t look promising. This applies to 1 and 2 above. The data mining and equipment to run 100,000 tests a day point to 4 above (deep pockets.)

3) Apply the hypercompetition model to Roche.