Traditionally, managers depended on experience and intuition to develop insights—“gut feel,” if you will. Most often a gut feel is based on past experiences.  Gut feel and intuition are important but in a fast-changing competitive environment, experience of the past is less and less valuable. Foresight, not hindsight, is of value. Foresight is a result of understanding, through structured and unstructured data, the unfolding of competitive dynamics…..Continue reading Analytical Tools Provide Business Insights

According to CK Prahalad and MS Krishinan, competitiveness favors those who spot new trends and act on them expeditiously. Therefore, managers must develop insights about new opportunities.To do so, it’s required a comprehension of consumer expectations and behaviors and technological changes, as well as the nature of the supply chain and opportunities for its improvement. How does one spot trends early? Can a firm develop tools that aid in building insights? While traditional analytical approaches are often asynchronous with business changes, real-time analytics seize the opportunities and mitigate the risks in seeking to have global resources serving single customers. Continue to read Real-Time Analytics as a New Source of Competitive Advantage

ICICI’s performance has been stellar. But such growth and increase in scope also carries their own seeds of risk. The risks are around the several parameters: Continue to read A Word of Caution (from the Case of ICICI) to learn more about these parameters

According to CK Prahalad and MS Krishnan, ICICI’s capabilities are built on three core capabilities:

(i) Business process flexibility to reflect evolving business models;

(ii) Synchronization of strategy, business process, and ICT architecture; and

(iii) Senior management leadership in shaping social infrastructure and culture.

(click on the link to learn more)

(i) Core Branch Banking (1998); Internet Banking and Brokerage in India (2000); and (iii) Localized Credit Scoring (2001)— Customized Credit Rating System in the Indian Context; (iv) Behavioral Scoring of Individual Customers; (v) Overseas Remittances; (vi) Customized Corporate Banking Solutions; (vii) Rural and Microfinance Solutions and (viii) Personalized Insurance for Diabetes. Click here, here and here to learn more.

As depicted in the table in post Migrating to N = 1 and R = G: The ICICI Business Model on How to Compete, ICICI has been the first to bring a number of banking and financial services innovations to the Indian market. In 2005, the CEO, K. V. Kamath, announced two major initiatives at the annual meeting to shareholders: Going Global and Going Rural. Since then, ICICI’s increasing global presence in the United Kingdom, Russia, the Middle East, South Africa, Southeast Asia, and Canada has expanded its market of expatriates and international customers globally while at the same time helping to support rural self-help groups and community banks in India and other developing nations. The two initiatives—global and rural—may appear as polar extremes; however, both initiatives, at their core, are based on common capabilities built over the last decade. Continue to read ICICI-Induced Innovations in Financial Services in India

In the mid-1990s when ICICI emerged as a player in both the retail and corporate banking fields, its business model was built around the simple premises. Continue to explore more.

As Wal-Mart, FedEx, and eBay demonstrate, business processes are a source of competitive advantage in an N = 1 and R = G world of competition. Can these advantages be built in a systematic way? The case of the transformation of a bank—ICICI in India— is used as a way to build consciously the connections between corporate strategy, business models and business processes, and the underlying technical and social architecture to gain competitive advantage. This post will look at ICICI business logic and its choice of corporate portfolio. Continue to read The Migration to N=1 and R=G at the ICICI Bank: Clarity in Business Logic and the Choice of Corporate Portfolio

While few grasp the importance of business processes as a source of competitive advantage, several major firms recognize and leverage it to their advantage. This post will look at how Wal-Mart, FedEx, UPS and eBay use their business processes as the core element of their competitiveness. Continue reading Business Processes as a Source of Competitive Advantage

As digitization permeates every aspect of business, most business processes are enabled by the ICT architecture. We will now focus on the ICT architecture that underlies business processes. The ICT architecture is not a monolith. It can be divided into its components as depicted in the figure in the post: Business Process and ICT Architecture