Question: TECHNOLOGICAL GLOBALIZATION

Competency 437.1.1: Global Market - The graduate analyzes information and communication technologies to take advantage of global market opportunities.

Scenario: You are the chief information officer (CIO) for a small company that manufactures novelty athletic shoes. Your company's market includes North and South America, and Japan. The company has roughly 2,000 employees in three offices: the corporate office in California, and two regional offices in Mexico and Malaysia. The office in Mexico manages both the manufacturing and the sales and marketing for South America, while the office in Malaysia does the same for Southeast Asia. Employees in the regional offices are well-educated, creative, and engaged individuals. They are well aware of the latest market trends for their regions.

Due to growth in your company's product lines and markets, the company has added an office in India. This office will govern sales and marketing for the growing market in India and China. It will also oversee a manufacturing plant in China.

Currently, marketing teams in the regional offices gather information from their authorized outlet stores and from customer comments on their website. These offices then coordinate with the corporate office, transferring the information via spreadsheets and e-mail.

Your company's chief executive officer (CEO) believes that in order for the company to retain its competitive edge, company employees need to be able to communicate new ideas with each other more efficiently. Furthermore, the marketing directors in each of the offices would like more effective ways to communicate directly with the company's audience. The company is particularly interested in learning trends from customers themselves. However, storing, organizing, and retrieving this information remains a challenge.

The CEO has asked you to create a team to investigate technologies and procedures to help the company remain competitive. Your team, composed of employees from marketing, sales, and IT, has brought forward two proposals.

Proposal 1: To improve inter-office communication, the company will install a server product that combines web server, social networking, and wiki capability, allowing information to be shared easily. The server product will organize and store information, and will ensure that information is easily retrievable. As a result, all authorized company members will be able to obtain raw data as well as contribute to ongoing projects conducted by company members in each office. Each office will receive an upgrade in its firewall-to-firewall virtual private network (VPN) connection. This will ensure high connection speeds and protected company information. The server product will be backed up daily via network-attached storage (NAS), and the server will be isolated by firewalls. Everything will be run internally by company employees.
To improve communication with customers, the company will hire additional marketing services. These services, which report to each regional office, will provide more granular information about their respective markets. For example, the marketing service for the United States will report to the California office, and the marketing service responsible for the China market will report to the India office. These additional marketing services will communicate directly with customers and will design campaigns to obtain information from customers through store outlets and the company web server.

Proposal 2: To improve inter-office communication, the company will use a hosted wiki service. This service will store and organize data so that it is easily retrievable. All company offices will be able to store all types of data on this wiki service, including typical office documents, voice mails, and video. It will also be able to obtain and store feeds from various services, such as social media, SMS texts, and instant messaging.

The third-party provider will be responsible for backing up all data, and will provide the corporate office in California with a copy of backup data each day via a professional web-based file hosting service. All company offices will be able to upload, view, and download data via a web browser. All communications will be protected via the highest permissible version of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) allowed in each country. With the exception of the VPN, all other services will be provided by a third-party hosting service. The information storage, data retrieval, and backup will be provided on a software as a service (SaaS) model.

To improve communication with customers, the marketing department for each office will be responsible for using social media. Information received via these services groups will be automatically fed into the wiki service.

Task: A. Justify the implementation of one of the proposals by doing the following:

Note: As you write this justification, pay special attention to discussing the importance of specific technologies that will help make this company successful.

1. Discuss one short-term advantage the proposal brings to the company.

2. Discuss one long-term advantage the proposal brings to the company.

3. Discuss how one short-term disadvantage of the proposal will affect the company's success.

a. Justify one possible solution to the short-term disadvantage.

4. Discuss how one long-term disadvantage of the proposal will affect the company's success.

a. Justify one possible solution to the long-term disadvantage.

B. Discuss how globalization trends and cultural factors could affect implementation of the proposal.

C. When you use sources, include all in-text citations and references in APA format.

Note: When bulleted points are present in the task prompt, the level of detail or support called for in the rubric refers to those bulleted points.

Note: For definitions of terms commonly used in the rubric, see the Rubric Terms web link included in the Evaluation Procedures section.