Information systems in Amazon.com

Résumé du document

Business managers are moving from a tradition where they could avoid, delegate, or ignore decisions about IT to one where they cannot create a marketing, product, international, organizational, or financial plan that does not involve such decisions.
There are as many ways to use information technology in business, as there are business activities to be pursued. As a business end user, you should have a basic understanding and appreciations of the major ways information systems are used to support each of the functions of business. Thus, in this assignment we will discuss business information systems, that is, a variety of types of information systems (transaction processing, management information, decision support, etc) that support the business functions of accounting, finance, marketing, operations management and human resource management. In this assignment, first of all, I will make a presentation of the company Amazon.com and its history. We will see in this part the changes of Amazon.com from its early first-mover advantage through to the technology bubble crash in 2000, the introduction of a cost discipline, and its eventual emergence to what seems to be a profitable company.

Extraits

[...] ( Highly focused growth with a narrow product segment offering. 1997 : From early Growth to IPO 1997 was a year of exponential growth but there was a continued focus upon the US book market. ( Rapid growth through adopting a broader business model (product and service offering) and capital raising. 1998: Fast Growth This year saw the geographic and product expansion of the business with the opening of UK and German websites as well as the entry into music, gifts and video. [...]

[...] An agreement with SAS equips Amazon.com with a range of SAS software and services over the next five years. By providing insight into strategic internal and external processes related to corporate health, SAS e-Intelligence will help Amazon.com employees align their efforts with corporate goals through a framework that lets them and their managers share and act on knowledge easily and quickly. With SAS e-Intelligence, Amazon.com will be able to better serve customers by assuring that they receive orders as quickly as possible through improved inventory forecasting and management. [...]

[...] But it was not until Amazon made two major acquisitions that industry observers caught a glimpse of how the balance of retail power might shift. Amazon's pace was blistering. In June 1998, the company added music to its offerings. In one quarter, it became the leading Internet music seller, with more than $14 million in sales, much to the chagrin of stunned competitors such as CDNow and N2K. In the fall, it launched European book sites in Germany and Britain and added videos to its “media suite”. [...]

[...] We will see in this part the changes of Amazon.com from its early first-mover advantage through to the technology bubble crash in 2000, the introduction of a cost discipline, and its eventual emergence to what seems to be a profitable company. Then I will focus on the online book selling industry and study the various forces of competition that affect it, based on Porter's five forces analysis. My third and last part will focus on the business intelligence and the business information systems of Amazon.com. Presentation of the company AMAZON.COM Description of Amazon.com Amazon.com is an online retailer and provider of services. [...]

[...] Software from SAS, the world's largest privately held software company, is used at more than 40,000 business, government and university sites in 110 countries. SAS' revenues totaled more than $ 1.02 billion. SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. We can learn a lot about how information technology empowers the strategic moves and e-commerce success of Amazon.com. [...]