Current State of It in My Organization: A Snapshot

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the supply chain system has three important players recognizable in demand and supply sides- the consumers, businesses and administrative agencies (O’Brien, 2009). Noteworthy, all these players are internetworked in a manner that allows them to carry out business within the context of the traditional way, which includes such features as auction, haggling and discussions on terms of payment. It is also worth noting that Amzon.com takes the role of the administrator, retailers take the role of businesses while consumers are the global communities that visit the Amazon.com websites to purchase products and services.

Digitalized storage and assess of information and knowledge: The main strength of Amazon.com Inc

On her part, Shelly Foster stated that Amazon.com Inc has some major areas of strength that creates a competitive advantage over its competitors in the retail market. These strengths are entirely achieved through management of information system, where data and knowledge are stored, accessed and used in trading. I learnt that the company achieves a competitive advantage by managing its information system such as knowledge, data, transaction as well as the process of logistics in a manner that allows all the players to interact in a virtual community, which is devoid of temporal and spatial restrictions. Foster believes that the creation of value and increase in profitability can be achieved by investing in information systems development and management. The aim is to develop a radical and dynamic business environment (Mcdermott, Snyder & Wenger, 2002).

Moreover, I learnt that Amazon.com Inc uses a mainframe based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This architecture allows the company’s management system to gain a level of scalability, performance, availability of growth and enhancement of a wide range of fast and effective software. In this way, the system development process has allowed the company to perform an end-to-end data in order to store information about a large number of items, consumers and orders. In this way, the online sites are reinforced with a large volume of information, data and knowledge. Moreover, this makes the sites more attractive because it allows one to reuse the information in terms of partial work. It also allows one to use more than one context instead of a large process. Foster also informed me that they prefer SOA at the company because it is highly comprehensive, decentralized as well as fully distributed, enabling it to serve a large number of applications at the same time (O’Brien, 2009). This means that the company can widely vary its business model at any time of its operation.

Secondly, the company’s strength is achieved within the context of the company’s transaction processing system. The system supports all the business transactions. The transaction processing system creates convenience for all users, whether they are traders or customers. Globalised client community creates an opportunity to obtain free personal accounts that allow them to visit the company website by simply providing their login details. These accounts have unique and personalized features such as a “wish list”, a “shopping cart” and “shopping baskets”. In addition, there is a unique feature known as “One Click”, which allows customers to skip some steps involved in the checkout process because they can submit their billing addresses or credit/debit cards.

Moreover, the interview with Foster provided information about the company’s development of an online payment system as opposed to the dependency on the existing ones such as PayPal.com and Skill.com. I realized that the online payment system, known as “The Honor System”, was designed and developed to provide customers with an easy and instant method of payment in their Amazon accounts, but in a controlled process. I realized that the method is attractive to the customers because they are asked to provide their details such as billing addresses and credit card information for confirmation but payment can be made later. In addition, the amounts to be paid by a customer are automatically debited from the card after the customers have received their goods or services.

Thirdly, Amazon.com has developed the “recommender system” that provides its customers with the right and relevant information critical to their needs. This system is based on the past information about the transactions made previously by a returning customer (Sinclair, 2008). It takes into account the customer’s past behavior, the behavior of other customers with similar needs, the items browsed and purchases, similarity of each client and other such combinations. When a returning customer is browsing the company’s website to search for information about products and services, these factors as well as their combinations are used to make recommendations to the customer in order to make purchasing easy and attractive (Saunders, 2009). For instance, books, magazines or journals by the same author, similar authors, similar subjects or similar backgrounds or genera are displayed and recommended by the recommender system. In this way, it makes access to information fast and effective.

Weaknesses and challenges

Information system development and application, including electronic commerce, storing and accessing information using IS and the achievement of a competitive advantage are all affected by a number of issues in the modern context. In fact, Amazon.com deals with a number of problems associated with the development and use of information system in the modern world. For instance, laws and regulations in various countries are sometimes prohibitive to online business. While the company enjoys the dynamism of the law in the western world, penetrating some foreign markets in other countries has sometimes proved to be a difficult task. For example, countries have differing laws controlling e-business, communication standards, security systems and practices. A good example is the case of Amazon.com in China. In China, the company uses an official website known as Joyo.com to fit into the Chinese e-business system because the regulations in China are different from the systems in America and the western world (Spector, 2010). It was necessary for the company to adopt a different business approach when entering the Chinese market. In addition, culture and language differences affect Amazon’s business in some countries because the website must be configured to fit into the local culture. Moreover, it is worth noting that Amazon.com, like any other online-based organization, is faced with technical and security