6Corporate activities, law & security governance

• 6.1Corporate management & governance

  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.

• 6.2Operations research, IE & decision-making

  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.

• 6.3Accounting & finance

  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.

• 6.4Law, standardization & security governance

  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.