IT Strategist ExaminationStudy guide

Covers external-environment analysis (PEST) and the integrating SWOT, Porter's Five Forces for gauging industry attractiveness, the value chain for decomposing sources of value, Porter's three generic strategies (cost leadership, differentiation, focus), and VRIO—all as the judgment skill of choosing which competitive strategy fits the firm's own position.

Covers PPM (the BCG matrix) (star / cash cow / question mark / dog) for judging resource allocation across businesses by market growth x relative share, Ansoff's growth matrix for choosing growth direction by product x market, and M&A / alliances, core competence, and diversification—as the judgment skill of "which business to allocate limited funds to."

Covers the balanced scorecard (BSC) and strategy map that concretize strategy through four perspectives—financial, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth—and the relationship and causal chain among the final goal KGI, the critical success factor CSF, and the interim indicator KPI, as the judgment skill of "correctly translating goals into indicators and spotting a mis-set KPI."

Covers STP (segmentation/targeting/positioning) for carving up the market and setting the aim, the seller-side 4P and buyer-side 4C, the product life cycle, channels and pricing, CRM and LTV, and brand—as the judgment skill of "keeping the marketing mix consistent with the constraints of the target customer segment."

Covers management of technology (MOT), which ties technology to business value, and the four axes of innovation—product innovation that changes the product itself vs process innovation that changes how it is made; sustaining innovation that extends the existing performance axis vs disruptive innovation that redraws the market on a new value axis; and self-reliant closed innovation vs open innovation that draws in external resources—and judging which policy to choose under a firm's capability and speed constraints.

Covers the structure of the innovator's dilemma, whereby the more established a firm is, the more its focus on existing customers and sustaining technology delays its response to disruptive technology; the chasm that frames the diffusion process by the gap between early adopters and the early majority; the diffusion of innovations (adoption curve) that sorts adopters into five types; the hype cycle that traces the wave of expectation and disillusionment; and the two barriers from research to commercialization, the valley of death and the Darwinian sea—and the judgment of how a leading firm responds to disruptive technology without being bound by existing customers.

Covers the technology roadmap that links market, product, and technology on a time axis to chart the development path; the technology portfolio that evaluates the attractiveness of technologies to hold or acquire and the firm's own position; the technology S-curve that traces a technology's growth and its maturity limit, together with the judgment of switching to a next-generation technology; the patent strategy that defends and attacks differentiation; industry-academia collaboration that brings in external knowledge; and the core technology to lock up—and judging where and how to allocate limited R&D resources.

Covers design thinking, which discovers problems from empathy with users and iterates prototyping and testing; lean startup / MVP, which quickly validates hypotheses with a minimal product; the business model canvas, which visualizes a business's elements in nine blocks; and organizational ambidexterity (exploration and exploitation of knowledge), which reconciles deepening the existing business with exploring new domains—and judging, in a new business of high market uncertainty, between "build it out fully, then launch" and "test small and learn."

Covers digital business models—EC, the long tail, omnichannel, the sharing economy, platform business (two-sided markets and network effects), fintech, and subscription—as tools an IT strategist uses to judge "how the firm enters which market." The point is not term memorization but discerning which model fits according to the source of value (selling one's own product vs connecting two user groups).

Covers the business use of IoT, production-management methods (MRP, JIT / kanban, cell production), the smart factory (Industrie 4.0), CAD/CAM/CAE, and predictive maintenance, from the viewpoint of how an IT strategist judges manufacturing efficiency. A key point is trade-off judgment—such as whether to favor JIT or safety (buffer) stock under demand-variability constraints.

Covers SCM (optimizing the whole supply chain), CRM (deepening customer relationships), ERP (integrating core operations on a single foundation), SFA (supporting sales), industry-specific industry solutions (finance, distribution, manufacturing, public), and demand forecasting, from the viewpoint of an IT strategist choosing against the firm's strategy. A key point is judging whether fit-to-standard (fitting operations to ERP standard functions) or bespoke customization suits the firm's differentiation strategy.

Covers data-driven management (deciding by data, not hunch or experience), the judgment of which business problems to apply AI/machine learning to so as to create real business value, the use of big data, the digital twin that mirrors the physical into virtual space, and data utilization and value creation that turns data itself into value. The point is to invest AI where it links to a concrete management indicator (KPI), separating it from hype—not doing AI "just because it is AI."

Covers information-systems (IS) strategy, which sets the direction of informatization as a means of realizing corporate strategy, and the idea of an enterprise-optimization policy that cannot be achieved by stacking up local optima. It addresses that IS strategy must be aligned with corporate strategy, that department-by-department local optimization invites company-wide duplicate investment, silos, and data inconsistency, and the judgment of positioning individual investments within a whole picture drawn as the IS master plan.

Covers EA (enterprise architecture), a representative means of achieving enterprise optimization, understood as the four domains business (BA), data (DA), application (AA), and technology (TA); the procedure of drawing the target To-Be from the current As-Is and bridging them with a migration plan; the role of reference models; and the judgment of pinpointing "which domain (layer) a given issue belongs to."

Covers the three-stage distinction of digitization (localized IT-ization of existing operations), digitalization (digitizing whole business processes), and DX (transforming products, services, business models, and the organization with data and digital technology to establish competitive advantage); the use of stability-oriented SoR versus agility-oriented SoE; the DX promotion index; and legacy renewal and the "2025 cliff." The key is judging "mere IT-ization" from "true DX (business transformation)."

Covers the difference between BPR, which radically redesigns the business process, and BPM, which continuously visualizes and improves the process, together with business modeling via DFD and BPMN, automation via workflow and RPA, and the cycle of visualization and continuous improvement. The key is judging, for a bottleneck, "whether a radical redesign (BPR) is needed or an incremental improvement/automation premised on the existing process (BPM/RPA) suffices."

Covers managing not only the acceptance of individual projects but the whole company's IT investment as an IT investment portfolio balanced across "Run / Grow / Transform," program management that bundles multiple projects toward realizing a strategic benefit, the planning and requirements-definition processes of the common frame (SLCP), and the judgment of cloud/SaaS use and in-house vs. outsourced. The key is the investment judgment of balancing risk and return under budget constraints.

Covers the division of roles between the system concept, which draws the overall picture and policy of systematization from the management and information-systems strategy, and the system plan, which then makes concrete the target scope, structure, investment, schedule, effects, and risks; and the judgment of gauging premises, constraints, and risks through a feasibility study (technical, economic, operational) before committing to a plan.

Covers the distinction among business requirements (what the business must achieve), functional requirements (what the system realizes), and non-functional requirements (quality and constraints such as performance, availability, and security); the judgment of agreeing with users on the tradeoff between availability level and cost using IPA's non-functional requirement grades (availability / performance-extensibility / operability-maintainability / migratability / security / system-environment-ecology); and securing stakeholder requirements, requirements analysis, and traceability.

Covers the procurement order—RFI (request for information) to gather market and technical information, RFP (request for proposal) to present requirements and invite proposals, proposal evaluation, vendor selection, and contract—the items in an RFP, contract forms and the SLA and green procurement, and the judgment of preserving fairness by stating evaluation criteria in advance (e.g., issuing an RFI first when requirements are not yet fixed).

Covers evaluating IT investments with ROI, NPV (discounting future cash flows to present value and subtracting the initial investment), IRR (the discount rate where NPV = 0), the payback method (simple and discounted) measuring the years to recover the investment, and lifecycle TCO; and the ability to interpret numbers to decide which to weight when simple payback and NPV disagree (how time value and post-payback cash flows are treated).

Covers corporate governance that disciplines the firm, internal control (segregation of duties, etc.) that assures the propriety of operations, CSR/SDGs/ESG as social responsibility, BCP for business continuity, and the improvement cycle PDCA versus rapid-response OODA, framed as what an IT strategist should recommend to management and the board.

Covers the quantitative tools for evaluating and choosing among alternatives—decision trees (decision-making by expected value), PERT/CPM (critical path and schedule shortening), linear programming, inventory management (EOQ), queueing, and the pitfalls of correlation and regression—so an IT strategist can wield them when judging investment plans and schedules.

Covers reading the financial statements (BS/PL/CF), the break-even point measuring viability from fixed cost and variable-cost ratio, ROE/ROA measuring capital efficiency, and the gap between profit and cash (depreciation, insolvency-while-profitable), so an IT strategist can wield them when judging the viability of an investment or the profitability of a solution. The key is being able to compute the numbers and decide whether to invest.

Covers intellectual property (copyright/patent/unfair-competition-prevention), the compliance duties under the Subcontract Act (Act on Optimizing Small/Medium Subcontract Transactions), the PL Act, worker dispatch and disguised subcontracting, standardization (ISO/JIS/de facto), and information-security governance, so an IT strategist can wield them when judging compliance risks in procurement, outsourcing, and the business.