Planning an Affiliate E-Commerce Catalog Business
Planning an Affiliate E-Commerce Catalog Business
Katalogs Plus is a new business planning to launch in the next year. The company mission is to build e-commerce mobile applications and websites that sell merchants products and services. Affiliate marketing product and service data feeds will be used to generate content. Customers will click on a product or service and will be connected to the merchant site to complete the purchase. The purchase completed and Katalog Plus receives a commission for the referral of the customer to the site. The higher volume of customer purchases driven to a site will lead to increase commission for Katalogs Plus. Machine Learning and Data analytics, mobile applications location based services will be to assist in marketing new products and services to the user. This proposal covers the business structure and how infrastructure and information systems will be chosen and used. This document will include how knowledge and data will be utilized by management to gain a competitive advantage. The plan will describe the style and process of information technology planning and analysis. Lastly, the business proposed use of the Internet to sell, market, advertise and communicate with users and strategic partners.
Katalogs Plus: The One-Stop Shopping Site
Global retail e-commerce sales are growing at a fast pace. E-commerce growth as described by Butt et al. (2016) is estimated to be $1.67 trillion in 2015, an increase of 25% from the year before. In 2019 retail purchases are expected to be $3.57 trillion or 12.8% of all retail purchases. Katalogs Plus, a new business will combine mobile device applications, e-commerce, affiliate market networking, machine learning, big data databases, data science technologies and a strategic information technology platform which will deliver a robust revenue stream for Katalogs Plus.
Laudon & Laudon (2015) describes that the growth of mobile e-commerce has taken off in the United States. Users of mobile applications use them for location-based services and entertainment downloads which include e-books, movies, music and television shows. Tang (2016) refers to mobile applications as an App, which is the abbreviated name for a mobile application and usually designed to run on smartphones, tablet computers, and other personal mobile devices. A majority of mobile apps are free, although increasingly these applications are yielding huge revenue. The proliferation of mobile, along with smartphone usage, has dramatically changed traditional business models. Gartner, a research firm, estimates that global mobile application revenues reached twenty-six billion in 2013, up 44.4% from 2012’s eighteen billion.
An e-commerce website is a location on the Internet that merchants sell items online and deliver them via postal mail once the order is confirmed. An example of a merchant site is Amazon.com which sells hundreds of thousands of items. A merchant can market and advertise products on the Internet in many ways. One way merchants can sell and promote products is through affiliate marketing networks. Edelman & Brandi (2015) describe affiliate marketing networks as advertising where merchants will only pay affiliates, or publishers only when a sale occurs. They go on to describe the standard rules to be an affiliate earns a commission only if three things happen. First, the user browses an affiliate’s website; Second the user then clicks on the affiliates uniquely coded HTML link to the merchant's website and third, the user makes a purchase from the merchant. Once this occur’s the affiliate marketer receives compensation, which is usually performance-based and the merchant pays perhaps a five dollar or ten percent advertising fee for each purchase. CJ Affiliate by Conversant and Rakuten Market are examples of affiliate marketing networks. These companies provide links and graphics to merchant sites, tracking performance and handling payments to the advertisers also referred to as affiliates marketers. Affiliates marketers can use product feeds provided by the Merchant to build searchable mobile applications and websites using the product feeds.
Katalogs Plus will be an e-commerce business. The company will build mobile applications, and these applications will have the same functionality of the Katalogs Plus websites. The rationale for starting the business is to create mobile applications and websites to assist the user in finding the best price, quickly shopping for items and services locally and on the internet.
The mobile applications and websites will take advantage of big data and machine learning techniques to collect and learn about each new user that downloads the application or signs up on the site. During signup on either platform, the user is encouraged to login or connect social network accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Linkedin, and Google. They will be invited to participate in a survey to collect further information about what they like and dislike. Adding links to social networks will assist in profiling each user and allow the user to share great deals with the mobile device application or website and post this on social media to friends and family. After account creation, a profile will be built based on the information shared at signup, the information collected is used to market and sell product and services of interest to users.
Having the user install the mobile application will give access to location-based information if enabled and other data collected when the user agrees to install the application on a mobile device. The mobile device takes advantage of location-based services. When the user is looking for new items to purchase the application will provide prices from local merchants, or merchants on the Internet. The ability to set up price alerts for products and services is available to the users to get the best price when buying a new product or service.
Katalogs Plus will take advantage of strategic business partnerships and use affiliate publishing to sell new products and services. By marketing and selling e-commerce products, from merchant partner websites the company will be marketing and selling millions of products. The business will not stock any products but will refer customers to partner merchant sites and receive a commission for completing the purchase of the item or service. The site will sell advertising space to qualified businesses, partners, and other e-tailers and use Google Adsense to help monetize the mobile applications and websites when partner advertisements are not available for areas of the site or application. The company plans to collect the historical listing and removal of items and services provided by merchant partners to perform analytics. Collection and analysis of patterns for products will yield another revenue stream. Merchants will be able to glean insight into product selling cycles on the Internet from the data collected over time.
Overview and Structure of the Business
Mission
Katalogs Plus pledges to simplify seeking the purchase goods and services online. The mission of the company is to organize online e-commerce products and services to make them readily available and useful for customers.
Competitive Forces Model
Michael Porter’s competitive forces model identified by Laudon & Laudon (2015) as the most popular model for understanding competitive advantage. Porters model includes the strategic position the company, its strategies, the firm's view, companies competitors, and the business environment. Laudon & Laudon (2015) go on to discuss that the model focuses on the firm’s four competitive forces. They are new market entrants, substitute products, customers, and suppliers. Katalogs Plus investigated competitors and identified some fundamental forces that will be unique to its business. The fundamental forces that will be unique to this business are no inventory tracking required, collecting social media account information, cash back points system, use of data deep learning methods, survey and feedback from customers and location-based advertising the businesses competitive forces.
Katalogs Plus does not maintain product inventory. The company envisions this as a competitive advantage to other e-commerce sites that maintain inventory. The cost of the warehouse, shipping and returns are significant overhead the company will not need.
The customer linking a Katalogs Plus account with the social media accounts enable sharing deals and allow Katalogs Plus to collect information on interests of each client. Mining this data provides profiling the customer provide competitive advantages over other product and service search engine sites. Data analytics, data science, and machine learning will be used to crawl social media sites to build out our customer's profile.
Katalogs Plus will use surveys and ask for feedback during website and mobile application interactions to understand the client interests. Points towards a cash back rewards will be given to entice the user to share valuable information with the company. The company will benefit from business development team negotiating higher commissions with partners instead of the lower commission offered on affiliate partner networks. A portion of these partner commissions will be passed on to the customer via cash back rewards from purchased goods and services.
Advertisers and business partners will be able to take advantage of geofence advertising. The customer will provide a zip code or the location already know via location-based services or GPS. The partners will then be able to push advertisements or messages to the mobile application base on the customer’s location information.
Business Structure
The structure of the organization will grow over time. Since the organization is in startup mode some of these business units will evolve over time based on budget and success of the company. The business units of the company will be Marketing & Advertising, Business Development and Sales, Customer Service, Information Technology & Engineering, Operations which includes Human Resources, Finance, and Legal Counsel. Team building exercises will occur within the teams and between business units to build a cohesive team.
Company Roles
Information systems remain the vital part of an organization as discussed by Laudon & Laudon (2015). For most businesses; there would be no business if the company had no information system. The core elements of an organization are people, structure, business processes, politics, and culture. Organizations have a defined structure and different levels of organizational hierarchy and specialties. The structure reveals a direct division of labor. There are many ways information technology is used depending on the role a person works in for the organization. Some examples of management levels are executive management, middle managers, operational managers, knowledge or service oriented employees. Each one of these levels has a different way of using and looking at the enterprise data collected.
Executive management work on long-range strategic decisions about products and services as well as tracking the financial performance of the company as described by Laudon & Laudon (2015). Katalogs Plus executive managers take advantage of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) information technology that allows analysis of rolled up mobile device activity, website activity, and commission data enabling them to find where the most traffic or commissions are derived.
Katalogs Plus middle management executes the project and planning that the executive management has laid out. Wiki’s, agile project planning tools and application software are examples of Information Technology that a middle manager will use to move projects forward. Middle managers kick off new projects to assist in improving customer service or implement ideas identified by the executive management to create new revenue streams devised by performing OLAP analysis.
Operations management at Katalogs Plus monitors the day-to-day activities of the business. Operation Management works directly with the live systems and products or services the company offers. They make sure they are available twenty-four hours a day every day of the year. The operations management plan upgrades to existing systems that are in production.
Laudon & Laudon (2015) discuss that knowledge workers produce things or provide a service. Katalogs Plus examples of knowledge worker roles are systems engineers, data scientists, or product architects. These positions use software development tools to create the products, analyze the data and automate processes by using machine learning software.
Many business units employ people for specialized tasks in each area of expertise. Laudon & Laudon (2015) talk about specialized functions performed by business units; Examples could be sales and marketing, systems engineering, accounting, and human resources. At Katalogs Plus the sales and marketing team will take advantage of pay per click advertising campaigns using Bing or Google advertising. The accounting business uses information technology systems to track billing and revenue. The human resources team use payroll processing and talent acquisition systems.
Enterprise Information Systems Overview
An information system is described technically as a group of connected modules that gather or retrieve, process, store, and distribute information to support decision making and control in an organization Laudon & Laudon (2015). They also discuss that in addition to supporting decision making, coordination, and control, information systems may also help managers and workers analyze problems, visualize complex subjects, and create new products.
The information systems group will build a core group of team members needed to run the day to day activities of the company. Since this is a start-up business, some people may play more than one role to start, but as the company expands and onboarding of more people occur this will do away with multiple roles held by individuals.
As enterprise systems get installed, the architecture team needs to plan the communications between the information systems. This communication referred to as the “glue” that holds systems together. The glue is necessary because the company does not want to create duplicate data across the different enterprise system. If data common to two systems, is updated in one enterprise system, another may need updating too.
Enterprise applications are available and used by employees across the company. An example of a typical enterprise information systems across business units would be a payroll, accounting, and talent acquisition and will be accomplished using Workday.com. The sales leads and business development conducted using Salesforce.com. The leads turned into partners, would be connected via the Salesforce.com to Workday.com via a connector. The connector allows automated entry of leads into the accounting system as a new partner or customer.
The company will take advantage of collaboration software for team building and communications. Workforce customer communications are done with Email software. Google G Suite allows the use of email, calendar, document storage, and online document collaboration. Zoom.com conference collaboration software allows global teamwork. The communications software connects the remote workforce and enables collaboration for demos, meetings, conversations with prospects, customers, and remote employees. A wiki used for storing the company process and procedures on the intranet. The company wiki creates a common place to share and disseminate information across business units.
Mobile applications will push data into the cloud where it will be combined with website activity collected. The website and the mobile application data housed at Amazon Web Services. The website and data processing applications take advantage of horizontal scalability. Horizontal scalability enables applications to expand and shrink as needed to be driven by the demand of customers that download and use the application or website. Having a scalable architecture allows the business to save money by scaling down the number applications servers running when site use has diminished.
Your Company’s Infrastructure and Information Systems
Overview of Information Systems
The discussion of the Information Systems for Katalogs Plus includes the Infrastructure Plan, Enterprise Information Systems, and the Business Unit Information System’s needs. The Infrastructure Plan will discuss the company’s use of telecommunications, networking and wireless technologies and information assurance and security. The Enterprise Information Systems Plan is an overview of enterprise information systems needs for all our employees. The overview of business unit information systems will outline the technology needs unique to each business unit.
Infrastructure Plan
IT infrastructure components comprise of computer hardware, operating system, enterprise software, networking and telecommunications, database management and Internet platforms, IT infrastructure can also include consulting services and systems integrators as described by Laudon & Laudon (2015).
Katalogs Plus world headquarters will lease Class B office space in Colorado. Within the office, there will be a small data center with UPS backup power. The office has thirty work areas in an open plan each with ergonomic friendly desk and six meeting rooms. Each desk and meeting room in the facility will have access to category 6a Plenum Ethernet cabling connected to gigabyte switches in the data center. Two different Internet providers will be selected and routers installed and attached to the Ethernet local area network. Team members will have access to an 802.11ac wireless network all over the office. Wireless repeaters installed throughout the space for strong wireless signal throughout the office. Voice over IP will be used for communications.
Laptop computers will be issues to employees for their use at the company. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud platform will be used for servers need to run the business. Redundancy between the two sites will be set-up in case Google, or Amazon Web Services has an outage. The redundant data centers provide customers 99.9% up time. Open Source software will be used for development, operating systems, and database management systems whenever possible. For example Linux for the operating system, PostgreSQL for the database management system and Java for programming.
Information Assurance and Security will be substantial in the Katalogs Plus infrastructure. The company will configure and installed an Identity Management and Single-Sign-On service. Okta an Identity-as-a-Service (IDaas) provider will simplify how the company will connect people and technology while maintaining a strong security posture. Having this security model in place will provide a competitive advantage by accelerating the companies ability to securely access data and application on any device, at any time, from any location. Each person will use two-factor authentication to connect to the network, and all data is encrypted at rest. The Information and Security team will be in charge of the data governance plan for the company. Data governance policies will be defined in one country to start and will become more significant as data is spread over many cloud data centers across the globe.
Enterprise Information Systems
Enterprise Information Systems are standard systems shared across the company’s business units. Collaboration, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are Enterprise Information Systems installed for the teams to collaborate and share enterprise information. The payroll, accounting, and talent acquisition will be accomplished using workday.com. Sales leads and business development will be done using Salesforce.com. Once leads are turned into partners, a Salesforce.com to Workday.com connector well bring the lead into the accounting system as a new partner or customer.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are considered fundamental information systems that allow most organizations to achieve their business goals as described by Aburub (2015). The paper goes on to explain the widespread use of ERP systems has fundamentally reshaped the way business data is collected, stored, disseminated and used throughout the enterprise and indicates that most firms that use ERP systems consider them a backbone to managing business processes.
Workday is an ERP system that will provide financial and human resource management for the company. The product will handle financial transactions, accounting, analytics, and auditing capability as described by Workday (n.d.). The financial portion of the Workday product enables executives and decision makers with financial and business insight they can act on. The Workday human resources portion of the product will provide the company workforce planning, recruiting, and talent management working together in one system. The Workday application will give the business visibility into their labor force. Workday allows all the business units the ability to create, collaborate, and take action on financial, human resources plans in a single secure system.
Venturini & Benito (2015) describe the primary objective of a CRM is to track, capture and analyze customers' interactions and transactions over time. The CRM assists in converting the collected data into useful information for directing activities, such as creating personalized marketing plans, developing new products or services and designing communication programs that attract, reward and retain customers. They go on to discuss that CRM systems are used for obtaining and managing customer-related knowledge. Knowledge constitutes one of the primary assets of organizations and Knowledge Management refers to the process of capturing collective expertise and intelligence in an organization, then using them to foster innovation through continued organizational learning.
Salesforce’s Sales Cloud Lighting Enterprise edition will be used for customer relationships. The Sales Cloud products will give Katalogs Plus one central place to manage all sales and business development related activities. Salesforce (n.d.) points out teams will spend less time on administration and more time building partner relationships and closing deals. For managers, Sales Cloud gives real-time visibility into their organization's activities, so forecasting business leads and sales with confidence is easy.
G Suite Business will be used by team’s professional email, online storage, and other business tools to transform the way the company works. Included in the G Suite Business monthly subscription is the use of email, calendar, document storage, and online document collaboration as discussed by G Suite (n.d.).
Web collaboration conference software will be handled with Zoom. The office’s conference rooms will be set-up with large LCD screens and web cam’s for zoom video conferences. Zoom software functionality includes cloud video conferencing, group collaboration, simple online meetings, hybrid cloud service and partner product integrations as described by Zoom (n.d). Zoom integrates with G Suite Business calendar and drive which allows easy scheduling and sharing of documents for online conferences. Zoom integrates with Katalogs Plus single sign-on product Okta.
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is an approach to providing interoperability between the multiple disparate systems in typical enterprise infrastructure. Mulesoft (n.d.) discuss that the implementation of MuleSoft an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) will allow data to flow between all the Enterprise Information Systems. The product provides out of the box API connectivity between applications.
Katalogs Plus will use Mulesoft, a lightweight Java-based ESB and integration platform that will allow the connection of applications together quickly and easily, enabling them to exchange data. Mulesoft (n.d.) discuss how the software allows the company to integrate existing systems quickly. The communications technology of the enterprise applications does not matter. Applications could use, JMS, Web Services, JDBC, HTTP, or methods of applications programming interfaces (API). An ESB can be installed anywhere, the product integrates and orchestrates events in real time or batch, and allows enterprise system universal connectivity. Mulesoft (n.d.) discuss that the most significant advantage of an ESB is it permits different applications to interconnect with each other by acting as a transit system for carrying data between applications within the enterprise or to the cloud and Internet. Mule has powerful capabilities that include service creation and hosting, service mediation, message routing and data transformation.
Business Unit Information Systems Overview
Business Units require specific software to conduct daily business. This section will describe some of those needs for the teams. They are Marketing & Advertising, Business Development & Sales, Customer Service, Information Technology and Engineering, Operations which Includes Human Resources, Finance, and the Legal Counsel business units. Business Units will need software applications unique to the daily processes they focus on and once cost justifying the product(s) the team will be efficient and profitable in getting work done.
The Marketing & Advertising and team conduct publicity and marketing to attract new users and also market the download of the Katalogs Plus application onto a person’s mobile device. The team will need Social Media Management software to manage the company’s web presence. They will need pay per click advertising accounts set-up various companies and software application to manage all the campaigns across all accounts active. The team will work to market and advertise for new business partners. Any new leads are entered into Salesforce application for the business development to pursue as a new partner.
The Business Development & Sales role is to build relationships with product and services organizations. They will sign an agreement with company’s product or services so they can be integrated into the site and mobile application. Salesforce’s Sales Cloud Lighting Enterprise suite will be used for business development leads management and tracking.
Customer Service will assist clients with website and mobile application issues. They will also support any business partners with formatting and loading product and service data into system backend data systems. This team will also assist with maintenance and Access to mobile application and website access for users, merchants, and partners. This team will use Salesforce’s Sales Cloud Lighting Enterprise suite for communicating to merchants and partners and Zendesk to assist users with the mobile applications and website.
The business processes the Information Technology, and Engineering team are employed to handle are System Architecture, Building and Maintaining Mobile Applications, Building and maintaining a scalable website and Research and Development. The team collaborates with other business units to identify new needs projects and tasks. To get their work completed the team will be working with Agile Development Software, Desktop, and Mobile Development Software, Database management software, and Web server technology. Information Technology and Engineering process and procedures will be documented on a Wiki. The wiki creates a common place to share information across business units.
The operations team which includes the human resources and finance will handle set up and manage business processes for the benefits, payroll, talent acquisition, accounting, and finance of the company. The Workday application will be used to automate and handle the payroll, accounting, and talent acquisition business processes created by the team and manage the enterprise data for this area.
The legal council will be outsourced and handle processing of patents, trademarks copyrights, issuing stock options and contracts creation review and negotiations. Katalogs Plus legal council partner will use their information systems to complete the business processes they need to complete. The output of the processes such as contracts will be utilized by Katalogs Plus to conduct business.
Your Company’s Management of Data and Knowledge
Overview of Data and Knowledge
Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) are typical systems sharinng information across the enterprise’s business units. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Collaboration systems are Enterprise Information Systems installed for the teams to join forces and share enterprise information. The data management strategy for Katalogs Plus is to follow strategies of other successful corporations. The data management plan includes storing information for different purposes. Transactional processing systems (TPS) collect day to day activity of the company. The transactional history will be migrated and stored in a data warehouse database. For website and application activity, NoSQL data stores will be used because the amount of data could be significant. Transactional data collected will be rolled up or summarized to allow reports and frequent updates on the progress of the business. The executive team and managers data mine this information for growth planning or realign the business after a downturn to move the company in a more productive direction.
Enterprise Data Plan
Enterprise data plan will discuss the use of data at Katalogs Plus. The transactional database, operational databases, data marts, data warehouse and NoSQL make up the types of data stores. Transactional systems are database systems that capture hourly and daily data transactions for the enterprise. Operations teams need to know the status of the business on a daily basis. Operation data store (ODS) will assist these team with a one to three-day roll-up of transaction data so that they can make informed decisions about the business in the short term. Data warehouses store historical data about business over the long term. The data warehouse will store data since the inception of the company. Data marts are summarized databases unique to a business unit or specific purpose. NoSQL databases are used to store detailed data such as web click and mobile application usage.
Data Management Issues
With many companies, there are difficulties with managing data. The primary challenge is keeping relevant data in relational or NoSQL databases. Disparate systems and data stored in file systems such as Microsoft excel word and even Access are discouraged by the Katalogs Plus information technology team. Disparate systems and data can slow business growth, and the ability to compete with competitors. The information technology team works with business units to be sure data gets incorporated into enterprise systems, and the information access is granted to business units that need it. After data integration with enterprise systems, the data can be accessed using a query language such as structured query language (SQL). SQL allows team members to ask and find answers to questions using simple query language.
Corporate bad data is a common downfall in the implementation of new applications and websites. Bad data or poor data quality often occurs from applications written quickly without correct database design. Applications sometimes are written with tight deadlines so products and services to market. Other times there are no information policies in place to be sure this does not happen. Katalogs Plus plans to have data administrators and database administrators working alongside the engineering or development team will assist in enforcing company data governance and information policies so bad data does not become and issue. Using the referential integrity features, unique and foreign key indexes available in relational database management systems will help in enforcing data quality checks.
Securing data and systems from bad actors is an identified issue. Securing the data from bad actors is a problem the company and the information technology security team will be collaborating with teams to find solutions, define processes, procedures and monitor the enterprise networks, data, and applications. Single sign-on security using Okta will assist in protecting user access. The security team’s enterprise and data policies and procedures require all data to be encrypted at rest.
Knowledge Gathering, Data Processing, and Tools
The key to Katalogs Plus knowledge managements systems will be keeping all systems up to date between using the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to maintain the ERP and CRM synchronization along with any business units systems that need to stay up to date. The ESB will be in place to easily connect information systems. Mulesoft (n.d.) points out that Mulesoft’s ESB increases the organizational agility by reducing the time of implementation of new initiatives as a common reason that companies implement an ESB for the backbone of their IT infrastructure. The ESB eases this by providing a pluggable system that scales well. The ESB provides a way to leverage existing systems and expose them to new applications using its communication and transformation capabilities. Using an ESP and application programming interfaces instead of Edit Transform Load (ETL) processing makes it easy to communicate from the data center to cloud-based systems. The ESB delivers API-based connectivity with immediate integration. The ESB isolates applications and databases from one another by providing a middle service layer unlike traditional ETL tools usually used for data integration.
Now that the company data has been captured and organized using information system policies and data governance the business intelligence tools will be utilized for further analysis. Tools for database querying and reporting, multidimensional data analysis (OLAP), and data mining will be put in place for the business units by data specialists in the Information Systems team.
Data mining using Hadoop will be necessary as the data sets become so large that they cannot be processed in a reasonable time. For Katalogs Plus the processing of the web and mobile application data usage patterns will use this technology. Having all this data will assist the company in understanding patterns of use by the user population.
Your Company’s Use of the Internet
Overview of Internet Needs
The overview of Internet needs for Katalogs Plus will discuss issues, messaging and collaboration tools and the use of e-commerce technologies. The utilization of the Internet by the Advertising and Marketing, Customer Service, Business Development and Sales and Human Resources and Payroll, and Information Systems teams will be discussed.
Katalogs Plus business entrenches itself in all e-commerce activities. The prime focus of the company is to drive Internet traffic to the website and have new users sign up for the mobile application. The team wants to engage the user and maintain the best site revisit rate compared to all of the competitors. Raygun will be used to monitor user interactions with the website and mobile application. Raygun (n.d.) describes the Real User Monitoring product will track if individual pages are loading slowly or causing issues. It will perform periodic crawls of the website to identify performance problems and recommend how to fix the problem. The product makes recommendations on how to improve the website speed and which fixes will make the biggest impact. The team will have to have in-depth knowledge of business partner’s e-commerce websites, products, and services. By staying in touch with partners, the teams will understand how to launch the new products and services as the partners bring them online.
Business Use of the Internet
The Advertising and Marketing will use the Internet for the purpose of attracting customers and trading partners. They will use social media interaction tools to monitor and comment on postings relevant to Katalogs Plus. They will take advantage of pay per click advertising on the Internet to advertise and market the brand. Customer service needs the Internet to support customers via social media and email and to communicate system issues, planned outages, new releases, and other information.
The Business Development and sales team will use the Internet to engage new merchant partners. They will track leads and educate current and possible customers about the business products and services available. The team will use the Internet to keep their business partners up to date with a product roadmap. Internet access will provide partner’s access to our Extranet.
Human resources and the finance department will have Internet-facing talent acquisition software needed to attract new talent to the company. Employees will have access to payroll, benefit and training systems from the Internet. They will be able to keep the information up to date and have access to the training system via the Internet. Access to the Intranet will be provided by a Virtual private network (VPN) so that employees, contractors, and business partners may access internal systems via the Internet.
The information systems team will need to be sure the server and client information passing from the Internet to the extranet, intranet, and internal computers are secured. They will need to keep bad actors from penetrating from the Internet to the internal company systems on the intranet. The information technology team will engage with business partners to format and import new products and services into Katalogs Plus website and the backend of the mobile application. Interaction with the mobile application and the website will be tracked over the Internet and stored for data mining and analysis.
Your Company’s IT Planning and Analysis Processes
Information Systems Planning Overview
Katalogs Plus is a startup company and the Information and Technology, and Engineering team will maintain the Information System Plan and a roadmap for the business and business units. The Information Technology and Engineering project management work in close collaboration with the senior management team and business unit stakeholders to align the strategic plans with the Information Technology Plan so that the rollout or integration of products and services are available and delivered at the right time. Information Technology and Management teams did not work together back in 1980 as identified by Lee (2015). Katalogs Plus view the most important part of the information system planning process is to align the information technology plan, competitive strategy and strategic business plan to be sure the company has a short, mid and long-term plans to innovate and stay competitive in the marketplace.
Information Systems Implementation Overview
The Information Systems and Engineering team have a core group of team members needed to implement the Information Systems Plan for the company. The Information Systems team will use Agile Development Methodology to manage projects and scope the work that needs to be built and developed. There are many Agile frameworks within the Agile Development Methodology and Katalogs Plus plan on using the Scrum Agile framework. Scrum teams are used to manage projects and implement the features of a project. Scrum teams consist of a scrum master, product owner and various Information Systems and Engineering team members anywhere between five to ten members. The scrum team product owner works with stakeholders of the new system or feature, breaks the system features to be built into smaller work units so that the team can complete the work as described by Sachdeva (2016). The scrum master, similar to the project manager, collaborates with the team to quickly resolve any issues, collect status from the team and be sure there are no blockers in getting sprints completed in the time allocated. Laudon & Laudon (2015) describe agile development as a form of early delivery, continuous improvement application development.
Agile Scrum is broken down into sprints that include stories which are small defined units of work as described by Sachdeva (2016). Sprints normally are two or three weeks in length. Each sprint includes a series of stories that describe a portion of work to complete the feature. The Scrum team’s system analysis and system design be design is not a written document but a face to face or video chat collaboration of team members and the business owners that need a system built. Completing the analysis and design via communication and collaboration, a first cut of the code is complete, and more cooperation and iteration occurs until the team is satisfied. The process is iterative and requires feedback throughout the process. The important principle to remember about the scrum process is that all features for a product may not be code complete in one sprint; it may take more than one sprint iteration to complete the feature since the process is iterative code could be refactored or rewritten as many time during the build of a product feature.
At the end of an identified number of sprints a release is created, tested by quality assurance and the release pushed into the production environment. The iterate process then starts again with new product features and the teams continue to build out the product features. The waterfall approach or traditional systems development life cycle as identified by Laudon & Laudon (2015) includes a lifecycle of a product. The product flows through steps from start to end. Traditionally they are identified as system analysis, system design, programming testing and then the product goes into production and maintenance mode for updates. Katalogs Plus is choosing an iterative approach to development, not a traditional waterfall approach. With the agile approch, incremental product releases are available quickly, and feedback is collected. Then features may change or be updated iteratively during the scrum agile development process.
Management Decision Support Practice
The use of management decision support and intelligent systems at Katalogs Plus will be readily available with the Infrastructure, Enterprise Systems, Data Management Plan and the ESB which are included in the System Architecture by the Information Systems and Engineering team. To summarize the planned implementation includes an enterprise CRM, ERP and ESB software and the Data Management Plan which includes Transaction Processing Systems, an Operational Data Store, a Data Warehouse, Data Marts and NoSQL databases. With these foundation systems and data stores created and in place the team can realize the power of decision support and business intelligence systems.
Databases and data stores will collect data so that many decisions get extrapolated from all data gathered by Katalogs Plus. There are unstructured, structured and semi-structured decisions as described by Laudon & Laudon (2015). Unstructured decisions occur when the decision maker need to analyze, evaluate or gain insight by studying data to help decide the company strategic direction. An example is the executive team forecasting and identifying what products and services to launch with Katalogs Plus mobile app and website by gaining insight of the past sales for data and products clicked on in the past. A structured decision is made on definitive data found in the company’s data systems. An example of a structured decision is the marketing team using the operational data store, which stores data for one to three days to track sales of product and services. This information is used to supply cash back to customers based on what they have bought and is an example of a structured decision.
A semi-structured decision is based on structured data found out on the system, but a final determination is not made until some unstructured data is collected analyzed and this will finalize the decision. A Katalogs Plus example of semi-structured data would be supplying the marketing team product and services sales reports for the mobile app and website so they can come up with a targeted pay per click marketing plan.
The Information Technology and Engineering team will use Business Intelligence and SQL query tools to empower team members, managers, and executive management to access the data collected and develop or assist team members in developing decision support queries to uncover and tie information together. The queries assist in answering questions and identify and resolving problems to move the business forward. Areas the team will focus on are data mining unstructured big data in NoSQL data stores that contain detailed mobile application use data and website click data. Using data mining algorithms, and implementing a scalable Hadoop cluster will help understand the client usage pattern. The usage patterns will be utilized for marketing and to build a better target marketing plan to attract new customers. Understanding the users will be utilized by the Business Development team to find new partners and increase the number of products in the most popular categories.
Information Assurance Plan
The Information Technology team will have specialists in information assurance and security to protect the company’s data. Information Assurance is essential to keeping the businesses operations operating and includes writing information assurance standards, procedures and policy documents and producing and maintaining the disaster recovery plan as identified by Laudon & Laudon (2015).
The Information Technology and Engineering Information Assurance team will manage the security policy for Katalogs Plus. This security group’s responsibility is to protect people, information, brand and tangible assets. The team will handle the company’s physical security, information assurance, information security and risk assessment. Physical security is the protection of people. The team requires all company employees and consultants to wear badges, and the information assurance will address safety and secure the offices. Information assurance includes audits of systems, tagging and tracking equipment, compliances with software and hardware systems, accredited system access and keeping team members up to date about security measures and potential threats. Information Security or InfoSec cover monitoring and analysis of commercial systems, network security, cyber security, suspicious emails, incident response and firewall support. The last responsibility the team handles is providing security risk analysis and threat intelligence to reduce corporate risk.
Katalogs Plus intends to store a significant amount of data in the cloud and some in the corporate data center. Katalogs Plus businesses information is primarily retained electronically. Storing the data in electronic format allows easy access to the information and at the same time exposes sensitive information such as electronic contracts to bad actors that may breach the network and gain access to the company’s servers.
Acceptable Use Policy
The acceptable use policy for Katalogs Plus is created by the Information Systems and Engineering team along with assistance from the legal council. The acceptable use policy will define for team members what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in relationship to use of company assets and use of the network. Examples of what topics will be covered in Katalogs Plus acceptable use policy are the use of the companies data, Internet usage in the office, use of the company computing assets passwords, badge policy, social networks, sharing of proprietary information. As part of the acceptable use policy, the company is committed to providing our employees a healthy, safe and productive workplace. Our team members are our most valuable resource. Katalogs Plus undertakes to providing our employees with a healthy, safe, and productive workplace where they are treated with respect, appreciation, and dignity. Team members personal information will be protected by the company. Only authorized Katalogs Plus team members with a valid, work-related reason may have access to employee personnel records kept by the company. Those individuals with access are expected to maintain all employee information in the strictest confidence and not to share such information except on a “need to know” basis associated with a legitimate business purpose. Proper use of company resources, including our physical assets, systems, and intellectual property, is critical to Katalogs Plus operations and reputational integrity. All company assets are to be used for Company business only. As a general rule, Company resources are not to be used for any personal benefit or the personal benefit of anyone else.
Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery
A business continuity plan (BCP) is created to concentrate on how a business can reestablish corporate operations after a disaster occurs as identified by Lauden & Laudon (2015). A BCP, once defined for Katalogs plus will help classify the most important business procedures and come up with documented step or procedures for handling mission-critical tasks if these information systems brought down and offline. Katalogs plus will regularly test the disaster recovery plan. The disaster recovery plan will be maintained by the Information Systems and Engineering team. The servers of Katalogs Plus will be running across two cloud service providers for redundancy. An easy way to test the database disaster recovery plan will be failing the database master from one data center to another and back again. The team plans to practice or execute disaster recovery plan every six months to be sure the documentation is valid. At this point, the team does not think a disaster recovery service is needed since servers will be running on Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud. The disaster recovery plan emphasis is mainly on the technical issues involved in keeping systems up and running, files to back up and the maintenance of failover computer systems.
Company Code of Ethics
The company code of ethics policy will cover values the company expects from team members treating other team members, consultants, and customers. Examples are acting with integrity, respect, harnessing innovation and inspiring curiosity. The policy will point out how to make making ethical decision and questions to ask to decide whether to engage in a particular activity. Katalogs Plus wants team members to raise concerns or report violations to a supervisor or manager if issues arise. Laudon & Laudon (2015) discuss that ethical questions in computer systems have new urgency by the growth and use of the Internet and online commerce.
Conclusion
Katalogs Plus is a startup business that has a mission to build e-commerce mobile applications and websites that sell merchants products and services. Getting the business up and running is the highest priority, so the team plan to use affiliate marketing product and service data feeds to generate content initially, then the business development team will build partnerships with other firms.
The structure of the business will start out small with twenty or so team members. More will be brought onboard as needed as the company grows. The business will be broken into five separate business units to start and evolve over time based on revenue generated and success of the enterprise. Katalogs Plus will have a clear structure and different levels of organizational hierarchy and specialties.
All team members will have access to the company’s information systems. The information systems will be planned by the Information Technology & Engineering team and will be vital to the business’s success. IT infrastructure components comprise of computer hardware, operating system, enterprise software, networking and telecommunications, database management and Internet platforms. Katalogs Plus headquarters office space will be located in Colorado and will include a small data center, thirty work areas, and six meeting rooms. Team members are issued laptops and allocated VOIP phones for communications. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud servers are used to run the business. The company will use a Single-Sign-On service which includes two-factor authentication to protect users and secure the companies data.
Enterprise information systems used at Katalogs Plus include Collaboration, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. Payroll, accounting, and talent acquisition will be accomplished using workday.com. Sales leads and business development will be completed using Salesforce.com. The data stores are most important to understanding how the business is performing. Data stored in transactional and operational databases, data marts, a data warehouse, and NoSQL data stores. Transactional data collected is rolled up or summarized to allow reports and frequent updates on the progress of the business to team members. The executive team and manager’s data mine this information for growth planning or realign the business after a downturn to move the company in a more productive direction. An ESB will allow data to flow between all systems. The ESB allow different systems to insert, update or delete data in one or more systems when a transaction occurs in one system and needs updating in another to stay in sync. The ESB allows the enterprise to maintain data integrity.
The use of the Internet is key to Katalogs Plus business model and e-commerce business. The information systems and engineering team have recognized this and made sure that there are redundant pipes to the Internet, so teams will always have an active connection to the Internet to stay in touch with customers, business partners and follow the brand on communicating on social media follow the news.
This Katalogs Plus plan has been constructed and thought about from many angles. The business structure, roles of team members, customers, business partners, marketing and competitive forces. The Executive team thinks blending the management team strategy and the information technology plan will be most import in making and continuing the success of Katalogs Plus. The one common underlying theme between all these are they include working with data, Information Technology and The Internet. The data from activities are stored in data stores and transformed into useful information for the company. These are the foundation or building blocks needed for the business to move forward and become competitive for years to come.
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