Information Technology Amazon.com Situation Analysis

Information Technology

Amazon.com Situation Analysis

Having grown through a series of partnerships and the incremental development of new online merchandising stores they own and have alliances with other companies to promote, Amazon.com today is faced with the following key factors that define their strategic position. First, there is the need to find higher levels of efficiencies in their core business, and as a result of system-wide consolidation at the same time increasing the use of analytics applications including SAS and E.phinany, the company is gaining greater insights into it customers' unmet needs than ever before. Second, the growth of online sales and the need for optimization as defined by the work of Dr. Russell Allgor also needs refinement and more focused efforts to better streamline the core processes the company relies on in completing its supply chain, order management and fulfillment strategies. Finally the current situation analysis is one where elusive profitability must be found in devising more effective cross-sell and up-sell strategies of comparable products.

Amazon.com Problem/Opportunity Statement

Using insights and analytics to ascertain the unmet needs of its millions of customers, Amazon.com needs to redefine its cross-sell and up-sell strategies to stress profitability over inventory turns.

The Computer Industry

Answers to Dell Case

Actually the pace of technological change is rapidly accelerating, more driven by the bandwidth accessible from broadband connections and the entirely new classes of applications being built to take advantage of this. There is also the factor of operating systems needing greater memory, processor speed, and disk space. This is also driving the demand for higher performance computers. For businesses to remain competitive they cannot wait to refresh their computers.

Information technology is critical to Dell's success in that there is the definite need of coordinating their supply chain, order capture from their website and also from their sales staff, and the development of effective cross-sell and up-sell campaigns for their products. The role of information technology is what unifies all the various systems that make Dell successful.

Dell's current status of its recycling plan including WEEE and RoHS initiatives is leading the industry in terms of recycling efforts, specifically being driven by the demands in Europe for adherence to these initiatives.

Dell is expanding into consumer electronics and corporate networking products to offset both the margin pressures they have on their main PC and laptop businesses, and to develop a diversified set of revenue streams for the company to rely on in the future.

The number of computers Dell can sell through their existing distribution channels is limited by the total available market size, the company's specific pricing policies, and the moves of competitors. The use of retail channels is not a good option as these are typically channels that require a high level of margin per unit to sustain the basic infrastructure of the channel itself.

Answers to Gateway Case

The Gateway stores failed due to the high costs of operation and the relative low level of sales per store. In addition, the stores were very expensive to keep open and ultimately failed due to a lack of profits being generated.

Gateway can survive and the current leadership which has a strong background in cost reduction from eMachines may move production offshore to China and Taiwan, making the profit per unit more achievable. Today the company however is struggling to attain profitability as its supply chain partners, many still U.S.-based, have higher prices for the lower volumes the company is ordering. Gateway can survive; yet it must emulate eMachines even more and move production offshore, including all supply chain partners, to attain the price points necessary to compete.

Answers to Sun Case

Sun can survive if the company manages its customer loyalty as effectively as possible; making sure their focus on customer retention is comparable to Apple's. In terms of pure price competition relative to Linux and high performance generic PCs, Sun will not be able to withstand the competitive threat. For Sun, the answer to their future growth and stability is in services and software.

Not directly, as they are part of an alliance with Microsoft and IBM to define the Java standard. They will however be successful commercially selling Java-based development tools; their focus on development environments for Java is the best bet.

Networks and Telecommunications

Why are standards so important in networks?

Due to the need for each system to be able to communicate with the other, it are essential standards be in place. Hence the development of the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) Model which lead to the development of the Internet and the Ethernet standard and the TCP/IP protocol, both of which nearly the entire Internet runs on today.

#9, in what way have phones and computers converged? Why is this convergence occurring?

The personal productivity tasks of communication as it relates to the use of telephones and computer systems has long been an area developers and entrepreneurs have poured time and money into. Now with the concept of the Mobile Web, it's possible to have PDAs and cell phones that make it possible to access any website, any e-mail account, from any location there is a cell phone signal. The impetus is the overlap of personal productivity processes.

Computer Security):

Q.#9, Read the information on the Thawte Web site about how users can be authenticated (Web of Trust). Briefly explain how the system works. Do you think this is a secure and reliable system?

The system uses as series of authentication algorithms to verify the identify a person is who they say there are. This is a secure and reliable system to the extent developers use the Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) and other mechanisms for integrating these techniques into applications.

Transaction and Operations):

Review questions 2, What is electronic data interchange (EDI)? Why has EDI taken so long to catch on? Will business ever use EDI for all transactions?

EDI is a batch-oriented protocol used for completing transactions between companies, and has been in use as an order processing, validation and transaction technique for over forty years. EDI has many limitations, foremost being its approach to batch-oriented processing (most companies run it overnight) and the highly defined series of commands it uses. There is little flexibility in the programming of EDI commands; it is very inflexible. As a result of these factors and the fact that it is slow and increasingly out of touch with the needs of businesses running real-time systems, EDI is stagnating at the minority of transactions today.

6, Why has it taken so long for new payment mechanisms to be adopted?

Because each company's order management system is uniquely different and aligned with their specific approaches to doing business. No two companies do business and manage orders the same way, hence the wide variation in how new payment systems are implemented and adopted.

What is meant by the term "data quality"? Give three examples of problems with data quality.