Alpha Ltd. company is a large retailer with more than 16000 employees, having outlets at different locations in India. The company is offering computers, its peripheral products and its services. Their business growth is

CS Professional · Information Technology and Systems Audit · PYQS · December 2020
Alpha Ltd. company is a large retailer with more than 16000 employees, having outlets at different locations in India. The company is offering computers, its peripheral products and its services. Their business growth is badly affected due to competitive environment. It has also come to the notice of the management that there is a significant dissatisfaction of customers in the matter of servicing. Alpha Limited expressed a need for high capacity, high bandwidth network to meet their evolving business requirements and to serve their customers in better ways. Company also decided to subscribe for cloud computing services and also desired to adopt Mobile commence for conducting financial and promotional activities. As an IT expert, management of the company has sought your advice on the following issues: What advice would you give ? (b) What strategies would you suggest to follow for effective success of Extranet ?

Answer & Explanation:

Some of the important strategies necessary for success of Extranet are discussed as under: Understand the return on investment: The business should develop its extranet with specific goals in mind, such as improving customer satisfaction, reducing operating costs, increasing sales, or any other goal. Companies must establish clear goals and work toward them because extranets are expensive. Select your audience and meet its needs: Extranets are designed to cater to the external entities of a business, such as customers, suppliers, government regulators, and stockholders. The company should carefully select the entity or entities that it wants the extranet to serve. Once a decision is made about the audience for the extranet, the next step is to carefully identify specific information problems the extranet will address. Be willing to change: An Extranet is a work in progress. Companies must continue to invest in the extranet if it is to meet the changing needs of its audience. Otherwise, the extranet will become quickly outdated, defeating its purpose. Keep things simple: People want clean, crisp, easy-to-click on applications, because many visitors may not be proficient with the Internet, it is important to make extranets intuitive and easy to use. Users do not want to spend an enormous amount of time on clerical functions, so such functions, in particular, should be easy to use. 24 hours a day: Extranets should be up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Visitors should be able to access the extranet anytime from anywhere. In the case of global companies, this becomes imperative, given the time difference between different countries. Work with end users: When IT staffs try to build an extranet without help, the project's chances of success sharply diminish. Successful extranets are a joint venture between IT and the business end users. Create a partnership: An extranet requires solid communication between human resources and the vendor supplying or managing data. Designing an easy-to-use interface is a good start, but data must flow back and forth smoothly and transparently. Manage content/provide value: The interactive capabilities of the Web are one of its greatest strengths. An extranet allows employees to view accounts real-time and model data in ways that weren't possible just a few years ago. Employees will use an extranet only if they see value in it not because it reduces costs for company. That means content must revolve around the needs of employees and not the desires of the organization.

Topics: Extranet

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