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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.

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As the era of music CDs seems to come to an end several companies focus since the past years on offering music streaming services online.

Spotify and Apple Music are big well-known players in the online music streaming industry. These online music streaming providers offer often a free version with limitations such as a maximum number of skipping the song per hour, commercials after playing a few songs, lower music quality, etc. After signing up for the subscription of about 10$ a month, there are no limitations and you can stream all the music you can, wherever you want.

Now Amazon announced that the company will launch a music subscription service within the next few weeks that would work basically in the same way as Apple Music, Spotify and other music service providers, which you can stream anywhere you want on any device for a subscription of $10 a month.

Additionally, Amazon announced that they will also offer a different kind of music streaming subscription for just 5$ a month. This subscription will only allow you to listen to the music on Amazon’s Echo player (Kafka, 2016). Amazon launched the Echo last year, as an internet connected music speaker powered by Alexa. Alexa is Amazon’s Artificial Intelligence software. Furthermore the subscription of 5$ a month won’t allow you to use Amazon Music on mobile devices (Singleton, 2016).

A lower priced service of 5$ a month has been implemented before by other companies. However, those were usually variants of web based radio services, which didn’t enable users to pick any song they liked, whenever they wanted to listen to that song.

Amazon shows a new twist in the music streaming industry market. The company tries to make use of a positive sales result of their hardware product. By promoting their hardware product Echo, they attempt to influence consumers to purchase the Amazon Music subscription of 5$ a month. After their introduction of the Echo player last year, they sold already about a million units. Their information reports shows that they aim to sell another three million units this year, and 10 million in 2017 (Efrati, 2016).

Therefore the other music streaming providers should definitely keep an eye on the new service of Amazon, since they never know how loyal their consumers really are when pricing strategies are involved.

 

Resources:

A.Efrati. 2016. [online] Accessed by: https://www.theinformation.com/amazons-high-hopes-for-echo-sales

M.Singleton. 2016 [online] Accessed by: http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/6/13190540/amazon-music-service-echo-streaming-launch

P.Kafka. 2016. [online] Accessed by: http://www.recode.net/2016/8/22/12593158/amazon-music-echo-alexa

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Every day most of us travel on crowded streets to get on time at our jobs, schools, or other appointments. But in these days were everything happens fast, time is even more worthy than before. Traffic jams can be really nerve wracking in the early morning and are a waste of our time. Additionally the overall human population is only growing and growing, and the world becomes only more packed than ever. (United Nations Population Division, 2008)

The company UBER announced lately that it will start with the testing of self-driving cabs. But this innovative company could even do more!

Why should we do the same thing for years and years is what UBER’s Products Head Jeff Holden must have thought. At the Nantucket Project Conference last weekend he revealed his brilliant insightful technology for the future: Short-haul flying in cities with small planes that can vertically take off and land, also known as VTOL aircrafts. These little airplanes do not need a long runway like a traditional aircraft. Furthermore Jeff Holden came up with the idea that these airplanes could land upon buildings in congested cities, so no special runways have to be build. Therefore these VTOL aircrafts could be an ideal solution to avoid traffic jams in the future. (TNW, 2016)

The service should become a way cooler UberPool option, that many people could use together. But at this point you may be thinking, hey they offered helicopter services before right? Yes UBER did, however these were purely a big marketing effort and these helicopters are unrelated to their new VTOL aircrafts. (Recode, 2016)

Their prediction for the future is promising, since Jeff Holden is expecting that the new service could be offered within a decade. But before we all happily take off, the airspace regulations are hopefully considered. Since you might be faster, but when you collide it is an ever shorter trip.

Nantucket Project Conference, 2016
(https://www.nantucketproject.com/nantucket-project/presenters/jeff-holden)
Recode, 2016
(http://www.recode.net/2016/9/25/13048094/uber-vertical-takeoff-aircraft-jeff-holden)
TNW, 2016
(http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/09/26/uber-wants-to-build-planes-to-beat-city-traffic/)
United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects, The 2008 Revision. (http://www.prb.org/Publications/Lesson-Plans/HumanPopulation/PopulationGrowth.aspx)