Lumiere Swot Analysis

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- User participation

- User education and training

- Improvement of end-user interface

- Resolution of organizational problems prior to introduction of new system

- Implementation and challenges: Survey employees to study what they value and are interested in the most -> build the loyalty and incentives program based on the information analyzed. The company should carefully think of an integrated system that can do all the 3 cloud applications are doing to relieve some burdens of the employee shoulders (one of the company’s mission is to attract and retain employees). Employees want a certain stability level when doing the work instead of changing and adapting to a new procedure and system every other 3 months or so.

- Narrowed research and quick implementation:

- Analysis: Lumiere is heavily involved in searching for suitable apps on just one platform- Google Marketplace. By Lumiere limiting its apps to just one platform, this does not give Lumiere a full exposure to a wide range of apps that can potentially help the organization be successful. By the same token, Lumiere implemented many software systems that they believe would help the organization increase productivity and allow the employees to provide quality work. Some of the software systems they implemented were in fact not the right fit to the organization such as Manymoon and Mavenlink. This coststed money and time (trials and errors) and demotivated employees to adapt and work effectively due to multiple changes and failure that resulted from lack of thorough research and proactive assessment.

- Recommendations: suggest Lumiere to do more research and see what other applications are out there since it is evident that Microsoft is getting into cloud technology. If Lumiere research into other options other than Google Marketplace, this will allow the organization to grow its business and be much more diverse. Instead of having multiple softwares, the company can pick an integrated business software that can satisfy all of its management needs. ERP system is a solution (which providers to choose from requires more researches).

- Implementation: The company should research a new system more carefully through multiple stages (over the next year) with the help of the external coach via:

- Business Process Reengineering.

- Company should have a project team to work on project structure where specifications are clearly defined.

- Also, company should talk to competitors, trade associations and vendors to learn about poplar and effective systems that meet the business needs.

- The company should do thorough analysis on payback period and indicate key milestones.

Other issues/Recommendations (long term):

In the long run, the company will face risks of obsolete technologies if they cannot keep up with innovation. Also, with potential business growth in new locations and expansion globally, the company have higher business needs that need helps from a high-end IT system. Like Maruti Suzuki with multiple services and locations worldwide, they found Oracle (ERP) could help with different business needs and standardization in practices.

- IT Governance. to help create value from projects by providing process to align system development with organizational goals. Responsibilities and authority is clearly assigned and defined

- Costs of technology and tool obsolescence. When cloud computing mature, it will be become obsolete and in the industry where Lumiere is in, company cannot compete. Scaling up cloud or vertical scaling can be necessary

- Customer (partner and employee) relationship management: Client and employees are two key stakeholders at Lumiere (evident from their mission statement). Therefore, they need a system that can assist with retain and attract them. Business Intelligence can be incorporated to study changes in customer demands and preferences, especially foreign customers where culture difference plays a significant role.

- Digital Marketing:

- Social Media: – This strategy involves using social media networks and their large user bases to increase the reach of Lumiere. By doing so, Lumiere would gain access to the capabilities of referral audiences, users that connected with one another through a medium – Facebook.

- SEO: SEO affects the visibility of a website when searched organically through a search engine.

- Mobile platform development: With the increase in using mobile devices for work (cellular phones and tablets), the company can look into develop service access on this platform to become competitive by enhancing customer relationships through not only service quality but also service experience.

Management Questions:

What were the factors that had made this adoption easy? – thanks to the company’s pre-existing infrastructure in the form of intranet and processes. The CEO and CIO emphasized the importance of IT and the fact that computing was essential to the business to ensure employees adapted quickly. To ensure efficiency of implementation on the user end, Deepa and Milind measured team-member efficiency and contribution and linked them to each member’s compensation. From a technological perspective, since the cost of bandwidth decreased, this had caused the bargaining power of suppliers to decrease. With many other competitors offering cloud based services, Lumiere had an advantage since its switching cost is high, thus, Lumiere can easily switch to other providers.

How much of the firm’s efficiency could be attributed to the cloud? Majority of firm’s efficiency (70%) could be attributed to the cloud.

Should Lumiere start to explore new offerings? Under Issues part 3.

Would cloud technology continue to pay off in the future? How can it scale up as Lumiere expanded to new locations? – Cloud technology has many great benefits to the company that can pay off any investment and overstaffing costs due to increased productivity, efficient business process, increased employee accountability and management transparency.

Scaling vertically is accomplished by adding more resources to an existing work unit. For example, let’s say your web server is starting to underperform. There are many ways to improve its scalability