Sustainable competitive advantage through information technology

Abstract

This paper discusses the difficulty of achieving sustainable competitive advantage through information technology. While information technology proliferates and innovations arise frequently, few companies have been able to use IT to remain leaders in their industries. Using a framework proposed by Michael Scott Morton, this paper examines how one firm, Capital One Financial, has created sustainable competitive advantage through a powerful combination of its information technology, strategic planning, and organizational design. The first section provides an introduction and information about the Scott Morton framework. Section two provides background information about the credit card industry and Capital One;s history. The third section analyzes why Capital One's advantage has been sustainable to date and includes discussion of strategic, economic, organizational and technical reasons. Section four analyzes the risks to Capital One's advantage in the future and includes discussion of technicalogical risks, organizational risks and customer risks. The final section includes a summary and some conclusions.