The Management of Business Resources - Assignment Example

E-Business Describe an organization in term of its type, structure, functions, culture and stakeholders. Answer The organization taken into account is Amazon.com. It represents one of the largest e-tailors in the business. Users: Everyone is welcome to use Amazon’s website. Common users are third-party sellers (individuals, businesses and publishers) and buyers purchasing new or used goods at competitive prices, they must register to do so. Stakeholders: All users would be considered stakeholders. Other stakeholders will include Amazons technicians concerned with site maintenance and affiliates/associates such as Yahoo, Google, Excite, America Online, Netscape, @Home Network, GeoCities and Dell. Retail outlets may take an interest in their activities. Business Culture: Amazon’s main aim is to generate profit, enabling them to survive, re-invest and grow. The Amazon marketplace is concerned with generating sales and making sales leads purely through their purchase site. Amazon also aims to: Excel and maintain Customer Relationship Management (CRM.) Attract and enrol new customers. Retain existing customers. Communicate information. Gratify supply and demand. Make the site fun and interesting for users. Activities: Amazon is accessible 24/7. It is used by those wishing to buy or sell new or used products or to increase consumer knowledge of the products available. Tasks: Besides buying and selling goods, Amazon allows users to search, read reviews/content and receive recommendations/personalised services. Users can interact with each other. 2. Describe at an introductory level the nature and management of business resources (e.g. people, money, materials, equipment, and information) required to meet organizational goals. Answer: 2 The management of business resources is the prime ability for meeting with the goals of the organization. The business resources would make sure to engage into right planning and control for which the resources would be utilized at its optimum level. The various resources combined would be of direct use to the customer and would make sure that the objectives are met from time to time. The various factors are as follows: People: The various human resources are allocated for their skills and are placed in a position to influence a set of decisions regarding a business. The people are the most basic human resource and enable the working at several levels for making sure to add intelligence to the business and make effective decisions. Money: The monetary resources enable the organization to pool various other resources and meet the materialistic part of the business. The purchase of raw materials, meeting with short and medium term investments would result in better handling of the business and the resources at hand. Materials: The materials are required to be processed for deriving at a final product and to ensure better use of the other resources for meeting with the objective of the business. Information: It serves as a crucial investment for fetching the right amount of resources and to enable the business to know the right techniques, market conditions, pricing and better handling of product with the customer. Equipment: The various machinery is utmost required for processing the raw materials and to enable the long term investments for the firm with respect to their assets. The equipments also enables better productivity and would enable the business to strategize better information for growth and development. Other factors: The combination of resources serve the management to meet with the decisions and to enable the good working of the organization. The political factors and distinguished physical risk factors often influence their decisions quite widely. 3.Describe the role of the manager, a range of management styles and their suitability for different circumstances. Answer: 3 The role of a manager is to effectively manage the resources of the organization and to make sure that the objectives of the business are fulfilled. A manager would bring in together better communication skills, management skills, resource management skills and enough business acumen to effectively manage the resources engaged for meeting with organizational demands and objectives. The various management styles are as follows: 1. Autocratic: A type of management style where the manager takes all the decisions and does not involve the lower management or the subordinates. It is most suitable in situations where the business process execution is rested on the higher management and no affect of the decisions on the subordinates. 2. Paternalistic: At this style the decisions are for the good of the employees although taken by the higher management. Most suitable in cases where decisions would affect all employees of the organization to a certain degree (Donnell, 2003). 3. Democratic: At this style the decisions are collectively taken by all in the organization and final decisions is affected to all in the organization at a large scale. The mix of paternalistic and autocratic styles of leadership is most suitable as not all employees of the organization knows about the risks facing the organization and is often not informative to the socio-economic and political affects facing it. 4.Discuss some of the opportunities and challenges in the business environment particularly those related to E-Business Answer: 4 The various opportunities and challenges in the business environment can be dealt as under: Anytime Anywhere access: The customers can seek their leisure in accessing the website and placing request online unlike the strict working hours of the retail shop where phone and premises were opened for a limited time (Armstrong, 1996). Compare: The online store was provides facility to compare its products with each other and other products, so that one gets to analyze the product base and market availability for their choice and pocket. Tracking: Effective tracking of inventories and deadlines can be made possible using the website. Better display: The products and services can be made aware to the global users of all nature so that one gets a complete view of what can be fetched. It includes detailed description of the products. E-marketing: The online store can reach to millions of buyers and consumers and other businesses can put up their advertisements to get visibility of the services. These companies would I turn pay for helping them to perform direct and indirect marketing. Purchase online: The online store would facilitate online purchases using the secured protocols implemented with the e-commerce technologies using SSL technologies (Forouzan, 2003). The risks which are exposed for consumers and end users would be to highlight the various vulnerabilities that come along with the technology in the form of various Malwares and intentional programs. The composite feature of the security concerns are as follows: a. Content exploitation: It is quite often seen in practice wherein the content is misrepresented with wrong and misleading information about the subject. Often the content which is uploaded and saved by users are not properly referenced like Wikipedia and are nor taken as valid sources for fetching content in many universities. b. Identity theft: Websites like MySpace.com, FaceBook.com and Orkut.com assist a person to have a representation over the internet and allow each other to express one, create a community of friends, joining other communities and make new ones. The major factor of identity is theft of one’s actual self being and this poses a greater theft in maintaining the profiles. c. Access control: The security policies at this stage would be to disallow any unknown person to make the right move for getting the job done. To take in enough ethics for fetching the positive attitude for prevailing the correct methodology for communicating across other people and their communities. d. Denial of service attacks: The various attacks regarding the concerns to stop or slow someone from accessing a particular website or information. There are some service denial attacks for financial information and to make sure that right and timely information does not reach the intended recipient. 5.Explain the potential benefits of E-Business to a range of enterprise types, and the limitations or barriers to realization of these benefits Answer:5 Trepper (2000) mentions that e-commerce not only revolutionizes the business abilities of a business but profounds the very manner of doing business and making the right judgment towards customers and resources in general. The various potential benefits are as follows: The business would get a global recognition and would be accepted by all. It would create trust and confidence in the eyes of the people. Most suitable for commercial organizations selling goods to customers. The store would be able to reach a greater domain of customers so that it can be a good source for expanding their business. True for businesses with auctioning attitude. The store would require less budget for marketing as the website, in the form of information system would get the direct and indirect marketing done by itself. Most suitable for promotional and marketing companies. The business would have enough mechanism to track their product list and its availability so that timely action can be taken to update. True for supply chain management companies. References/Bibliography Donnell & Koontz, H (2003). Essentials of Management, McGraw-Hill. Forouzan, A. Behrouz (2003). TCP/IP Protocol Suite, second edition. Tata McGraw Hill. Hoffer, A. Jeffrey (2002). Modern systems analysis and design, Pearson Education. Koontz, H (2001). Principles of Management: An Analysis of Management Functions, McGraw-Hill, New York. Maheshwari, P. R (1997). Principles of Business Studies, Business & Economics, pp 256. Rindova, V. & Kotha, S. (1999) Building Reputation on the Internet: Lessons from Amazon.com and its competitors. Trepper, C. (2000) E-Commerce Strategies, Mapping your organisations success in todays competitive marketplace, Microsoft Press, pp.138-140, 153. Read More