Assignment Brief

Case Study: Craven Books

Craven Books (CB)is a comic magazine seller in Utah City, USA, with a 40-years life spam competing with mega sellers such as Dreamland Comics, Forbidden Planet, and Metropolis Comics. The company extended their market along North America and Mexico and plans to build-up a digital presence to approach the European market through multi-interface e-commerce and social media groups in order to promote their products to the new markets.

This growth strategy has led to an accelerating volume of sales. Accordingly, the company had to process customer orders in batches and recruit qualified store manager and IT specialist to develop a digital strategy consistent with their business strategy.

Once he was appointed, the IT manager outsourced the digital strategy to an independent IT consultant who decided to set-up two technological tools for the internal and external processes. Internally, aweighing machine was brought to the store to help checking the right order through weight check. An electronic mapping machine was also attached to this weighing machine in the store area to link the customers' order from the digital interface with the store management and help locate the relevant items. Externally, the IT consultant has developed a CRM cloud-based interface to help both customer and employees conduct transactions and electronic payment online.

Within a year of outsourcing the digital strategy, CB has failed and lost 90% of their customers in addition to making 60% of their staff redundant. Clearly, there was a misalignment between the business strategy and the IT strategy.

Peter Craven, the owner of this company, needs your help as a professional information management consultant. He wants to define the areas of misalignments and explore different possibilities of developing a more relevant IT portfolio. These possibilities might include CRM, ERP, and Open Source Software to save the business and fix the fragmentation in his business processes. Therefore, you are required to submit a professional report that can be read and understood by Peter Craven and his fellow team.

Your Task

You are anOIM consultant who has been employed to advise Craven Books on the effective implementation of these strategic changes.

Task A: Open Source Software Comparison Table

In this section you should conduct research into a suitable software solution for Craven Books. You should decide on the set of characteristics which you will use to evaluate the software and your research should consider 4-5 alternatives in detail. This section should be presented as a table.