Information technology can transform businesses in the way they operate and deliver value to customers. After performing an in-depth analysis on Reken Maar Verslagen a digital transformation is proposed in order to increase the company’s performance.
The company was founded by Jeroen Willemse. He decided to add sample exercises to theoretical summaries. This came out as a significant competitive advantage as he was able to take a large part of the market. The future ambition of Jeroen is to become the number one summary provider for all quantitative courses in the Netherlands.
Currently Reken Maar is using a few technical tools to structure the business operations. The firm uses Google Drive to store all information relevant to the firm. Jeroen has also access to a website which is linked to an excel spreadsheet, so that he can analyze the website’s activities and summary orders. Outlook is used to communicate with external parties such as the writers, proofreaders and the printing company.
Insights were gained through interviews, a SWOT-analysis, and an analysis to evaluate the alignment between the current business strategy and the information strategy, which is key to future success. Subsequently, we discovered the business need of an intranet. We could conclude that Sharepoint will streamline internal processes, increase efficiency, enhance collaboration and secure proprietary data.. This tool must be part of an ongoing strategy that will support the business’ ambitions while expanding. A set of managerial recommendations can be articulated in order to guide Reken Maar into the right direction and to ensure a smooth implementation of the SharePoint intranet.
As Reken Maar’s summaries are highly sensitive and confidential, a secure online environment is essential to safeguard this proprietary data. We recommend to implement the intranet SharePoint which guarantees a 99.9% uptime. This is a financially backed service level agreement (Microsoft, 2016). Another recommendation regarding to data security risks, is that users should have different access rights to the SharePoint intranet. This will protect against the risk of insiders leaking confidential information to external parties.
As Willemse (2016) has laid out his vision to gradually expand, it is recommended that Reken Maar start implementing SharePoint in a more standardized version at first. When the business becomes more complex upon expansion, Reken Maar will be able to gradually customize the technology and integrate new features.
Furthermore the use of an agile development method is recommended to involve managers and employees along the way. Staff should be appropriately involved and their feedback should be used to customize Sharepoint further. Additionally, SharePoint will enable a new way of collaboration which will in turn improve the overall staff satisfaction.
The investment costs seem quite high for a start-up such as Reken Maar. However our estimations predict that Reken Maar will be able to recover all of the necessary investments and annual costs when they will expand in the upcoming years. Subsequently, through investing in SharePoint the company obtains a strong information strategy basis that will support the firm’s growth in a systematic manner.
