CS 782AssignmentNo. 4 ~ Leveraging M-Commerce and mobile strategies

You are a CIO for an organization which is considering transitioning and expanding into a mobile market.  The organization that you are the CIO for is a retail organization selling to business and consumers.YOU can define what type of retail market they are in (i.e. selling software, selling traditional retail goods, selling services, etc.).  The organization currently has an e-commerce and brick/mortar presence.

The organization is getting pressure to expand into the mobile market and simplify purchasing of its services.  You have been asked to:

1. Evaluate what aspects of a mobile m-commerce strategy would be beneficial for the organization competitively. Consider some of the following…
   1. How does this simplify a consumer experience?
   2. How would this allow the organization to expand into new markets?
   3. How would this allow the organization to drive profitability?
2. Evaluate what aspects of mobility would impact or would be liable to impact the existing IT infrastructure and/or operations of the organization. Consider how this would impact…
   1. business workflow (how does this change the interactions with your CRM, SCM, ERP and other systems?)
   2. culture (how is this going to change the culture of the organization?)
   3. management structure (think about how you would manage this transition…. how would you change the organization?)
   4. ….. (what other aspects may impact this transition?)

As part of this mobile transformation, the organization has asked how you can improve its online presence.  Consider how you…

1. Would manage the organization’s online reputation and how it would change (or if it would change) by deploying a mobile strategy.
   1. How would you use advertising and mobile strategies to improve your communication with customers?
   2. How would you improve management in a mobile review-based environment?
   3. ….. (what other aspects would you need to manage?)

In your own words describe how you would solve the situations presented to you.  Do some research and find organizations which draw parallels to the above questions and how they leveraged the mobile market to improve their competitive position and how they used technology to manage their online reputation.

The deliverable is for you to provide a cohesive solution to the situations presented to you.  You should minimally have 3 sections to the body ofyour solution.

Use your research to draw parallels to support your assertions. Generalizeeach of these instances as far as you consider reasonable, and explain how IT needs to prepare for a transition to the mobile market.  You will want to do wide-ranging reading to refine, justify, and back up your generalizations.  If you like, categorize them.

This assignment reminds me of a situation that happened to me a couple of years ago…

I remember a time where we had an organization come to our executive board meeting where I work.  The organization was purchasing more equipment from us, and I was meeting with the CIO.  The CIO was telling me a story about how they were moving to a new mobile strategy for their retail organization.

The organization spent about 2M purchasing new equipment to roll out the mobile e-commerce strategy.  The organization rolled out the mobile e-commerce application and within 3 months began to run into scalability issues.  The organization went back to their IT department and was told they would need to spend another 1M to purchase new hardware and about 3 months to get the equipment up and running.  This was too much time and money for the CIO to spend.

The CIO needed another solution.  He called Amazon and within 72 hours had the additional resources he needed to scale his new e-commerce application.  A number of people in his IT department, who were against this move, quit, and the remaining helped to manage the relationship with Amazon.

This was a very good decision for the CIO, he met his financial, time, and scale goals for his business.

Your assignment should be between 6-8 pages of core content, single spaced or 1.5 spacdeof 12-point type excluding appendices, title pages, etc.  It should not exeed the maximum of 10 pagesbut we are far more concerned with the quality of your paper rather than the page length.  Refer to Module 0 in how to format and write and executive level paper.

End with a list of references following the standard reference format, as described in References and Citations document.

Use the Ask Your Facilitator Discussion Board if you have any questions regarding the objectives of the assignment or how to approach the assignment.

Save your assignment as LastnameFirstname_assign4.doc and submit it in the Assignments section of the course.