Academic Site & Blog

Examination of Charles Schwab's Business and IS/IT Strategy Alingment

The alignment and execution of Charles Schwab's (Schwab) business and information systems/information technology (IS/IT) strategies have made the firm a leading discount brokerage firm targeted at individual investors. Schwab is now the industry leader discount investment brokerage firm in terms of market capitalization (17.59B) and return on equity (ttm, 31.57%). In the following blog posts we analyze Schwab's IS/IT strategy using Porter's competitive forces (Porter.79,Porter.85, Porter.01) and the resource-based view (RBV) of strategy frameworks (Barney.91,Bharadwaj.00). Finally, we address the question of whether Schwab's success is sustainable (Carr.03,Brown.03) and introduce Hax's Delta Model (Hax.03) to facilitate this analysis.