IT/IS Strategy Report: Marlow and Co. and E-commerce

This report examines the IT/IS strategy of Marlow and Co., a company involved in the sale of industrial businesses. It explores the potential of e-commerce for the company, discussing its advantages such as reaching a larger customer base and fostering communication, as well as disadvantages like the lack of a personal touch and IT security concerns. The report delves into various e-commerce models and their relevance to the company's operations. It also analyzes risks associated with IT infrastructure development, including schedule changes, technical failures, and personnel issues. Furthermore, it assesses the applicability of the long tail strategy and the pros and cons of outsourcing, including offshore outsourcing. The report compares the advantages and disadvantages of setting up an online business versus a traditional physical store and provides examples of companies where IT plays a strategic role. Finally, it concludes by highlighting the importance of IT innovations in driving business growth and competitive advantage.

Running head: IT/IS STRATEGY
IT/IS STRATEGY
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author note

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Answer to question 1:
Marlow and Co deals in sale of industrial businesses that include manufacturing,
wholesale, distribution, business to business service operations and import. The company’s
Post Office, Lotto as well as the Newsagency division is said to be one of very successful in
Eastern regions of Australia (2020). The company is headquartered at Victoria and the
company has skilled brokers having diverse expertise. Their experience in accounting,
manufacturing, international trade, distribution and other small as well as large scale
businesses is an asset of the company. In the company’s website one can easily find the
businesses that are for sale in different sectors such as manufacturing, distribution, import
and many more. But it is clearly evident that company has not taken to online business that is
though informations regarding the products and services are available online, if a visitor
wants to buy a business he or she has to call on the contact number given to start the
negotiation. Thus, it can be said that the company can certainly think for exploring the online
business tools so that some improvisations can be brought in its operations. E-commerce can
help the company to be a part of the ongoing competition in the market and with this it can
organize as well as simplify a lot of operations (Khan 2016).
Answer to question 2:
E-commerce has become a revolutionary concept since its inception and has made it
possible for buying and selling activities be it of product or services through the medium of
internet. At present time this venture is also supported by transfer of money as well as data
which are required to complete transactions. It can be said that e-business refers to different
aspects related to operating of business on the online medium. There are many advantages of
e-commerce that include getting to reach large number of customers, using search engine
optimization is being used by websites to send user to their sites it helps companies’ to get

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customer insights by tracking as well as analytics (Choe 2016). Another main advantage is
that e-commerce fosters communication thus aiding fast response to the ongoing trends and
the demands of the market. There are some disadvantages as well, among which the most
common one are lack of personal touch that a user otherwise gets to experience when he or
she visits a store. The most prevalent issue these days is IT security issues and frauds related
to credit cards and other medium of payments.
Some terms associated with E-commerce:
B2C- This stands for “business-to-consumer” and this is based on the transactions in between
a company and customers (Li and Karahanna 2015). This business has the customers as the
direct end users and the examples are Wal-Mart and Staples.
C2C- This stands for “consumer-to-consumer” and in this both sellers as well as the buyers
are consumers and not businesses. C2C e-commerce presupposes interaction in between
different parties via a third part which is majorly a trade website or maybe online auction.
Some examples of this are Amazon and Flipkart.
B2G- This stands for “business-to-government” and this can be as small as a business
catering IT support service to the public in a town or as big as Boeing which develops
missiles and other equipments as such for the country (Bilkova and Machova 2015).
From the above mentioned e-commerce, B2B that is “business-to-business” is
different as it involves sale of goods as well as services in between businesses through maybe
some online sales portal (Qu et al. 2015). B2B involve two businesses thus it can be said that
buying scenarios are more complex as well as customized than the other discussed e-
commerce types discussed above.

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Answer to question 3:
E-commerce has the potential to compliment the call centre services but when going
for improvisations in the website and building up IT infrastructure there are various risks that
are to be faced. Some of the risks that the company had to face when creating the IT
infrastructure now are as follows:
1. Schedule- Sudden changes in the schedule and absence of personnel without prior
information.
2. Technical- Design not working properly, hardware and software failure comes under the
purview of this. This had an impact on end results or the outcome that the company wants to
achieve.
3. Personnel- Lack of proper skills of the workforce led to compromise in the project
proceedings.
4. Logistic- Chaos in this proved to be very harmful to the company as in developing IT
infrastructure this part plays a vital role as storage of equipments should be done carefully to
prevent losses.
5. User- The users face problem when not being able to perform core functions that are
rendered by the company (Kerzner 2017).
6. Project management- Absence of good project head affected the development of IT
infrastructure of the company as a project manager can be said to be as one of the main
players in the context.

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Answer to question 4:
Long tail refers to a business strategy that allows the companies to make significant
profits by selling of low volumes of some items that are hard to find. This is converse to the
concept prevalent that is selling of popular items (Ouyang, Wang, Zhang and Yang 2016).
Chris Anderson who first coined this term argues that these less popular items have the
potential to increase profitability, the only reason being that the customers are going away
from the mainstream markets. Long tail theory is not applicable for Marlow and Co as this
company deals in sale of industrial businesses and it can be said that selling of low volumes
of certain items theory is not that applicable. The company sales industrial businesses and not
products thus this theory has no significance in this context. The businesses that can be
benefitted from the long tail strategy are the fashion industry and microfinance businesses. In
fashion long tail strategy is helping many firms to enter the market as in microfinance
business. For example, Farfetch that was founded in the year 2007 can be said to be making
profit from long tail demand by offering the customers with assortment of various brands that
include not only the leading brands but also the niche ones (Abbafati 2018).
Answer to question 5:
The advantages of outsourcing to the company are:
1. Do not require hiring more employees and this saves not only money but also time. Hiring
new employees in the company requires providing them proper training, arranging for
orientation sessions and many more which can be avoided if employees are outsourced
(Somjai 2017).
2. Outsourcing employees for developing the IT infrastructure can help the company in
accessing a large pool of talent thus giving them workforce with diverse experiences.

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The disadvantages of outsourcing to the company are:
1. Lack of control- Outsourcing compromises with the control that company has on its other
hired employees thus affects the proceedings of the work. In the company it can result in
clash of ideas thus resulting in disputes.
2. Negative impact on the culture of the company- This is one of major drawbacks of
outsourcing that affects the company (Doval 2016). Outsourcing of employees at many times
is taken in a negative way by the hired employees thus effecting work environment.
Offshore outsourcing refers to a type a business process outsourcing in which a
business hires a third party supplier for performing a specific work in some other nation other
than one in which the hiring business is primarily being operated or conducting its operations
(Gurtu, Searcy and Jaber 2016). The company can make use of offshore outsourcing in case
the operations being carried out are becoming uncontrollable as this can help in overcoming
the difficulty.
Answer to question 6:
Some of the advantages and the disadvantages of setting up e-commerce are as
follows:
Advantages:
1. The businesses can reach to a larger target audience as compared to traditional system.
2. This helps in fostering communication in between the businesses and the customers.
3. The e-commerce websites have provisions such as including information such as demo
videos, reviews and many other such things (Arora 2019).
Disadvantages:

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1. Lack of personal touch- The customers do not get that personal touch in case of e-
commerce or online context as they receive when visiting physical stores. This is required for
the businesses that are selling high-end products or in this company as in this case customers
want to get a great experience while buying (Kashinath, Chandrasekharan, Ravindran and
Dijesh 2017).
2. IT security issues are another major concern in this case as more and more number of the
businesses as well as organizations have been victims of malicious hackers.
Answer to question 7:
Industry type Company Innovative
application of IT in
the company
Counterpart
company in which
IT does not play a
strategic role.
Fashion Superpersonal (UK based
startup) (Greene 2016)
Developed an
application that allows
users to try clothes on
the virtual medium.
Intelistyle
Trade Reece group Goodwork (Provides a
networking platform
for trade’s people
allowing them to
establish connection
with other traders).
Fortune speaks
From the above discussion it can be understood that IT innovations help in growth of
the company and brining in new innovations give competitive advantage to the companies

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over the other companies. Superpersonal succeeded in this venture and was able to capture
market and attract customers while Intelistyle could not. In the second case Reece group is
being made use of by many for fostering trade.

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References
2020. [online] Available at: <https://marlowco.com.au/> [Accessed 20 April 2020].
Abbafati, L., 2018. Disruptive innovation in luxury e-commerce: the case of Farfetch.
Arora, V.S., 2019. E-Commerce-The New Marketing Tool.
Bilkova, R. and Machova, R., 2015, July. Affect e-commerce services the use of services
offered by eGovernment?. In 2015 International Conference on Information and Digital
Technologies (pp. 39-43). IEEE.
Choe, J.M., 2016. The benefits in the adoption of proper forms of E-Commerce and the
moderating effects of E-Commerce capabilities. Korean Management Science Review, 33(1),
pp.17-33.
Doval, E., 2016. Is outsourcing a strategic tool to enhance the competitive
advantage?. Review of General Management, (23 (1)), pp.78-87.
Greene, M., 2016. Explaining the underlying psycological factors of consumer behaviour
with artificial neural networks (Doctoral dissertation, Cardiff University).
Gurtu, A., Searcy, C. and Jaber, M.Y., 2016. Effects of offshore outsourcing on a nation.
Sustainable Production and Consumption, 7, pp.94-105.
Kashinath, C.K., Chandrasekharan, D., Ravindran, T.R. and Dijesh, P., 2017, April. Security
Issues in E-Commerce: A Study. In Vidya CA Departmental Seminar (Vol. 25, p. 53).
Kerzner, H., 2017. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and
controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

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Khan, A.G., 2016. Electronic commerce: A study on benefits and challenges in an emerging
economy. Global Journal of Management and Business Research.
Li, S.S. and Karahanna, E., 2015. Online recommendation systems in a B2C E-commerce
context: a review and future directions. Journal of the Association for Information
Systems, 16(2), p.72.
Ouyang, W., Wang, X., Zhang, C. and Yang, X., 2016. Factors in finetuning deep model for
object detection with long-tail distribution. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on
computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 864-873).
Qu, W.G., Pinsonneault, A., Tomiuk, D., Wang, S. and Liu, Y., 2015. The impacts of social
trust on open and closed B2B e-commerce: A Europe-based study. Information &
Management, 52(2), pp.151-159.
Somjai, S., 2017. Advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing. The Business and
Management Review, 9(1), pp.157-160.