Essay Example on IT Governance: A Necessity for Effective Business Strategies

IT has played an essential role in business, and it is, however, critical to ensure effective and efficient IT alignment with the business strategies. IT governance has to be a formal framework in business that provides an integrative structure for the company to benefit from IT investments and support the objectives. It is, therefore, necessary for a business to have a formal IT alignment and practices across all the departments (Lincoln & Andrew 2018). The trends in the market, as well as the technology, keep changing, IT governance must be flexible and keep up to date as per the changes. IT alignment, therefore, refers to a formal process in which an organization utilizes information technology to utilizes and ensure success in the project and market strategies.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

The use of technology in business operations has enabled amazon to acquire benefits from a significant market share. IT alignment depends on the relationship between financial measures and the nature of information technology. Amazon is known for using the best integrative IT alignment strategies to run different types of businesses within the company. The company has considered aligning their IT systems to determine how the business in each line achieve its objectives, despite the changes in the technology and customer service systems Amazon has significantly adopted into these trends (Morabito, 2016). This paper, therefore, analyses the business-IT alignment of Amazon. It compares the IT alignment of amazon in the business line of selling products and line of sales of IT cloud.

Technology has evolved from an administrative means to a tool that helps to promote business operations more strategically. In Amazon, IT has helped to realize the benefits of their objectives through a positive alignment to business operations with IT. Amazon's IT alignment is based on the long-term objectives; most of the companies are known for focusing on short-term objectives as they design and develop IT strategies to help in selling their products. It is, however, a profitable strategy as Amazon considers long term effects of any strategy, and this helps to make decisions on IT alignment that can cope with changes in the market and technology.

IT alignment of Amazon in the line of business that deals with sales of products are considerably different from that of the sale of cloud services. This is because of the nature of products, b=needs, and expectations of their customers. Amazon is known for addressing the essence of customer-oriented practices that ensure satisfaction, product, and service quality (Morabito, 2016). it has achieved in the line of product sales by integrating IT strategies that such as the use of websites for marketing and selling purposes. The customers have much appreciated the application information technology in sales of products as most of the businesses across the world are adopting these IT strategies.

The company is technology-based that is most of the operations are carried out using IT programs. Amazon has grown into an online retailing company where more than a million retail investments depend on this company for supply and marketing services (Chen, Schutz, Kazman & Matthes, 2016). Behind their success in product sales to their customers through online platforms is because of service-oriented architecture (SOA). This form of IT integration into business uses new technology to deliver its promises. Amazon sufficiently uses online preform, in many categories to reach a large number of customers, offer more products, attract more merchants and sellers. It uses technology to hold large sets of data concerning their customer's purchasing preferences and history, and these data are used to improve IT alignment with the business and cope with the new changes in the market.

On the other hand, Amazon has dramatically advanced in cloud-based services; it is known as one of the most leading companies selling IT cloud services to different organizations across the globe. Some of these services include databases, computer software, storage services, networking, developer tools, mobile, enterprise software, security services, and management tools. All these services help the organizations to run their operations faster, lower the cost of acquiring IT services and scale. The sale of these services is based on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The organization uses IT alignment strategies to maintain their systems and respond to new changes to serve their customers effectively. The most significant success on cloud-based services offered by this company is a result of the trust that the organization makes purchases from Amazon have on the IT interaction and quality of services (Rekik, Boukadi & Ben-Abdallah, 2016). Also, the company has gained loyalty from many organizations as a result of these services. Amzon.com has become a general could service platform for e-commerce and other operations that relies on technology.

The Internet has created many incredible opportunities for Amazon to have access to the global market. Amazon IT alignment is based is concerned with the internet integration, the most apparent IT development that the company has utilized and has dramatically helped in all cloud-based services is the internet (Lincoln & Andrew 2018). The company established an effective and more importantly, flexible internet-based services. To succeed in the cloud-based market, Amazon redesigns their strategies to suit the new technologies and comply with the laws governing online-based businesses in the world.

Cloud-based services have provided a platform where other organizations can strategically succeed in their business as the company's IT alignment is focused on customer satisfaction. Cloud services are among the most trending business lines which other companies are adopting, despite amazon is one of the pioneers in cloud market, competition plays a role, but this has helped the company to use the technology to improve their services and achieve their main goal which is to satisfy their customers (Zhu, & Liu, 2018).

The two lines of businesses, which are the sale of cloud-based services to the organization and sales of products to customers, have greatly influenced the way Amazon aligns IT in their business operation. Cloud-based services on one side are not labor-intensive and provide real-time services. This platform relies on complete IT services to operate. It is one of the critical business IT platforms in amazon that is sensitive to changes in technology. The company, therefore, has developed measures to make computing services available for the organization at all times.

On the other hand, sales of produce t to customers is labor-intensive as it requires delivery services. Technology has dramatically been used in the company to enable customers to access their products, make payments through online platforms, and get their products delivered. This line of business is more expensive as the company must invest much in advertising strategies to influence the customer to access their site. Unlike cloud-based IT services, products involve physical items that are the products, and it also involves delivery services. For these reasons, therefore, the company has developed software applications that are user-friendly and are more accessible (Tan, 2016). Online operations on this line of business require constant monitoring and customer care services.

It is simple for an organization to access cloud-based services as compared to products meant for individual clients because these services are available in real-time. One of the most trending services that Amazon offers is the use of virtual machines, where organizations run different applications that is virtual to their business operations virtually without using physical machines, which may be expensive to buy and install. Amazon has dramatically aligned IT in web-based services to provide unlimited access to many services (Hosseini, Soltanian-Zadeh, Elisevich & Pompili, 2016). cloud-based services require less monitoring as most of the operations are carried out by the automated machines.

References

Chen, H. M., Schutz, R., Kazman, R., & Matthes, F. (2016, January). Amazon in the air: Innovating with big data at Lufthansa. In 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) (pp. 5096-5105). IEEE.

Hosseini, M. P., Soltanian-Zadeh, H., Elisevich, K., & Pompili, D. (2016, December). Cloud-based deep learning of big EEG data for epileptic seizure prediction. In 2016 IEEE global conference on signal and information processing (GlobalSIP) (pp. 1151-1155). IEEE.

Lincoln, I. V., & Andrew, C. E. (2018). Porter Analysis: A Business Strategy of Amazon. Com Through a Value Chain and Comparative Advantage Analysis of Amazon's Trademarks and Intangibles. Com Through a Value Chain and Comparative Advantage Analysis of Amazon's Trademarks and Intangibles (November 27, 2018). Practical Guide to US Transfer Pricing.

Morabito, V. (2016). Digital Business Strategy and IT Alignment. In the Future of Digital Business Innovation (pp. 141-159). Springer, Cham.

Rekik, M., Boukadi, K., & Ben-Abdallah, H. (2016, June). A comprehensive framework for business process outsourcing to the cloud. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC) (pp. 179-186). IEEE.

Tan, L. (2016). Cloud-based decision support and automation for precision agriculture in orchards. IFAC-PapersOnLine, 49(16), 330-335.

Zhu, F., & Liu, Q. (2018). Competing with complementors: An empirical look at Amazon. com. Strategic Management Journal, 39(10), 2618-2642.