IS Strategy: BI for Retail Competitive Advantage - MIST360 2019

This report examines the strategic deployment of Business Intelligence (BI) within a retail company, specifically focusing on how BI can drive decision-making and sustain competitive advantage. It highlights the alignment of BI solutions with organizational strategy, emphasizing value creation through cost control, optimized collaboration, and effective risk management. The analysis underscores the importance of BI in enhancing business operations, improving financial performance, and fostering innovation within the retail sector. The report concludes that BI, as a technological solution, significantly contributes to a company's overall performance by enabling better customer service, managing talent, and improving employee productivity. Desklib provides access to this and other solved assignments for students.

Running head: IS STRATEGY MANAGEMENT AND ACQUISITION
IS Strategy Management and Acquisition
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1IS STRATEGY MANAGEMENT AND ACQUISITION
Table of Contents
Introduction:...............................................................................................................................2
Business intelligent solution with organizational strategy:........................................................2
Business Intelligence value creation for Living Spirit:..............................................................3
Cost Control:..........................................................................................................................4
Optimization in collaboration, scheduling and planning:......................................................4
Risk Management:.................................................................................................................5
Concluding Remarks:.................................................................................................................5
References:.................................................................................................................................7

2IS STRATEGY MANAGEMENT AND ACQUISITION
Introduction:
Living Spirit is one of the largest and finest soft furnishing retailing company in
Qatar. This living spirit organization is currently providing a wide area of soft furnishing
products. In this category the organization is currently providing soft furnishing products for
the living room, dining room, bed rooms and for the lighting purposes. The Living Spirit has
claimed that from the past few years living spirit contributed largely in creating better life for
the peoples (Livingspiritlebanon.com 2019). This organization very much well focused on
the clients of them. They gathers data about the all the possible activities which can be done
by a customer at their home. Following the activities of their clients they prepares appropriate
soft furnishing products and this is one of the big reason behind the success of living spirit.
Business intelligent solution with organizational strategy:
The business intelligence solution consists services and software which transforms the
data in some actionable intelligence which is able to inform tactical and strategic business
decisions of the organizations (IşıK, Jones and Sidorova 2013). The tools under the business
intelligence access and analyse several of datasets and represents some analytical findings in
the form of dashboard, summaries, charts, graphs and in reports for providing information to
the users with a detailed information about the current business state. Considering the
business intelligence factors and the living spirit organization, the BI or the business
intelligence solution can be aligned with the overall strategy of the living spirit in many ways.
In current situation the living spirit requires a good marketing strategy for their
organization. Here in this case the business intelligence can help the living spirit to adopt a
good marketing strategy for them. Actually in this case the business intelligence helps the
living spirit by determining the ROI for the marketing strategy. Currently the market is full of
various making apps, analytics tools, social media platforms and many pay per click

3IS STRATEGY MANAGEMENT AND ACQUISITION
campaigns. In such type of market situation the business intelligence can be helpful for the
living spirit for determining the marketing strategy that they invested for producing the return
on investment (ROI) (Chisholm et al. 2016). Here the business intelligence can convert into
some analytics report by which the businesses can base their decisions in solid type of
research, facts, data and assumptions.
Generating a good amount of revenue is very much important for the living spirit
organization thus they must take appropriate strategies for generating a high amount of
revenue. For determining the strategies here the business intelligence can be very much
helpful as it helps to understand the businesses what drives the revenue for their business
(Laursen and Thorlund 2016). This can be very much helpful for determining what the end
user is, how the end users consume their information and what influences the decision of the
customers. In the current market situations there are thousands and more different outlets
which are pushing various of information and everyone in the market can consume it. In such
cases the business intelligence can be ideal for the living spirit organization for determining
how and where ideal consumers of them are consuming information and what factor is going
to drive them for purchasing the soft furnishing materials from their organization (Lim, Chen
and Chen 2013). The business intelligence can also help the living spirit for executing a plan
which is going to take advantage of that particular knowledge.
Business Intelligence value creation for Living Spirit:
The living spirit organization in Qatar is performing very much well in the sense of
marketing but it is still not enough for generating a high amount of revenue. Thus in this case
the organization requires a competitive advantage in the market for generating a high amount
of revenue. Thus in this case the living spirit can utilise the business intelligence for gaining a
competitive advantage in the market (Guarda at al. 2013). The business intelligence can help

4IS STRATEGY MANAGEMENT AND ACQUISITION
the living spirit organization for gaining competitive advantage in the market by helping in
this following steps.
Cost Control:
Cost control is an important step for gaining competitive advantage within the market
(Hilton and Platt 2013). From an external research it has been assessed that on average 35
percent of the total construction cost for producing the finished goods are spent on the
remedial works and on material waste. Thus in this case tracking of performance and cost can
create a difference. From another research it has been assessed that comparing actual
expenditures to the budgeted costs allow to take decisions whenever the adjustments are
needed (Subramani, Sruthi and Kavitha 2014). Thus for ultimate cost control of the
organizations the business intelligence can be useful for managing employee work hours and
inventory throughout the whole project, which starts with the estimating and bidding stage.
Thus monetary flow of the entire organization can be monitored.
Optimization in collaboration, scheduling and planning:
The business intelligence is very much useful as it provides easy monitoring and
tracking even if the project is very much complex itself (Sauter 2014). This helps the
organizations to maintain the proper schedule of the project and the collaboration which is
performed in every step of the project. The analysis report of scheduling provides an effective
planning while it optimizes the equipment and deliveries with the real time data of the
project. Thus using this insights of the business intelligence the living spirit organization is
able to analyse various patterns regarding the business and can uncover the issues that might
can create problem for the organization, so that delays and damages can be avoided in the
organization.

5IS STRATEGY MANAGEMENT AND ACQUISITION
Risk Management:
Every business faces with the risks of costs, legal, safety and delays. To run the
business under the controlled risks analytical understanding is required of the causes of it
(Wu, Chen and Olson 2014). Also, timely response and efficiency is required for keeping the
risks under control. The business intelligence determines the risky operations in the
organizations in early stages and mitigate this risks effectively. Managers are also need to
play an important role with the business intelligence for eliminating the risks factors.
Concluding Remarks:
From the above discussion it can be concluded that the business intelligence is very
much important for the organizations to improve their daily business operations. In this case
for the Living Spirit organization it has been seen that the business intelligence is able to
align the overall strategy for the organization. It has been also assessed that business
intelligence is able to create values for the organizations. In this case the business intelligence
has created the value for the living spirit by cost control, risk management and Optimization
in collaboration, scheduling and planning. Thus the overall assessment describes that the
technological solution like the business intelligence can improve the overall performance of
the organization. The technological solutions for the businesses are now very much popular
in the current market situations. It has been assessed that the technological solutions such as
the business intelligence and other technologies can improve the businesses in various of
aspects. This type of technological solutions is capable of improving the financial condition
of the organization by lowering the total cost of the organization and by generating a high
amount of revenue. In the organizational operations sector the technological solutions plays
an important role. In this case this technologies helps the organizations to get the job done
more efficiently. Not only these technologies helps in the organizational operational aspects,
but also this technology improves the productivity of the employees which actually improves

6IS STRATEGY MANAGEMENT AND ACQUISITION
the overall performance of the organization in the market. Customer service can be also
gained by these technological solutions which helps to run the overall business smooth and
helps to meet the customer expectations. Talented employees can be also managed and
retained by this technological solutions for improving the performance of the organizations.

7IS STRATEGY MANAGEMENT AND ACQUISITION
References:
Chisholm, D., Sweeny, K., Sheehan, P., Rasmussen, B., Smit, F., Cuijpers, P. and Saxena, S.,
2016. Scaling-up treatment of depression and anxiety: a global return on investment
analysis. The Lancet Psychiatry, 3(5), pp.415-424.
Guarda, T., Santos, M., Pinto, F., Augusto, M. and Silva, C., 2013. Business intelligence as a
competitive advantage for SMEs. International Journal of Trade, Economics and
Finance, 4(4), p.187.
Hilton, R.W. and Platt, D.E., 2013. Managerial accounting: creating value in a dynamic
business environment. McGraw-Hill Education.
IşıK, Ö., Jones, M.C. and Sidorova, A., 2013. Business intelligence success: The roles of BI
capabilities and decision environments. Information & Management, 50(1), pp.13-23.
Laursen, G.H. and Thorlund, J., 2016. Business analytics for managers: Taking business
intelligence beyond reporting. John Wiley & Sons.
Lim, E.P., Chen, H. and Chen, G., 2013. Business intelligence and analytics: Research
directions. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS), 3(4), p.17.
Livingspiritlebanon.com. 2019. ABOUT US | Living Spirit. [online] Available at:
http://www.livingspiritlebanon.com/about-us/
Sauter, V.L., 2014. Decision support systems for business intelligence. John Wiley & Sons.
Subramani, T., Sruthi, P.S. and Kavitha, M., 2014. Causes of cost overrun in
construction. IOSR Journal of Engineering, 4(6), pp.1-7.
Wu, D.D., Chen, S.H. and Olson, D.L., 2014. Business intelligence in risk management:
Some recent progresses. Information Sciences, 256, pp.1-7.