Identifying Opportunities, Essay Example

Overview

The General Electric company is a compilation of multiple different business entities in which it tries to highlight the most impactful assets of each business function.  On each page GE is not necessarily trying to sell you a product but develop a relationship with the receiver of the information.  Visually appeasing pictures and smart statistical references draw the individual browsing the website deeper into the purpose GE is trying to present.  GE is trying to present an opportunity to the problems we are facing such as energy conservation, healthy living and building America’s economic fortitude.  While GE never states that they are the solution to the problems they give examples of how they help building the way to those solutions.  GE’s business strategy is to build a brand innovation and imagination as well as built itself as not only a locomotive, windmill or hybrid electric water heater but as an American solutions company (GE 2012).

Information Systems

Data is available at any time in virtually any quantity.  The problem is that it may not be organized and presentable so that the consumer can understand and potentially take action on the information they received.  GE could a transaction processing system (TPS) report to acknowledge and report on the traffic that is flowing through the website site.  This could provide a gauge on the interest of those visiting the website.  This could help give the business decision makers another set of information so that they could facilitate business decisions.  In conjunction with the TPS pulling data from the hits and traffic of the website a geographic information system could help create target market information regarding who is accessing what information and where it is being referenced on a global level.  Since GE is a globally strategic company geographical information would create a huge benefit on determining which products to target in various parts of the globe.  The geographical information systems would also play an important role in securing the supply chain for the General Electric businesses.  The information regarding global disasters or other catastrophic events that may impact the supply chain could be identified and the supply chain could be temporarily or permanently modified to mitigate this risk.  This could create a competitive advantage because it would allow General Electric to maintain a consistent supply chain so that production of their goods is not interrupted.

By just viewing the General Electric website it is apparent that it is broken down into multiple business sectors.  These range from energy, healthcare, aviation to locomotives.  Each company within itself provide to a global network.  In order to pull all of the potential data and leverage among their supply chains and logistical systems they could utilize an enterprise resource planning system to help bring all of this data together in one place.  The enterprise resource planning system would integrate the core business functions and help automate certain functionality of those systems (Hoganson 2001).  Reporting is crucial to business decisions and will so much data available the enterprise resource planning system would bring that data together into useful information.

Competitive Advantage       

The competitive advantages of any information system rely upon its ability to manage data and turn it into useful information for the end users to act upon.  The TPS report helps derive information from the web traffic, the geographical information system helps with the understanding of where information is coming from and what events are happening globally while the enterprise resource planning tool helps coordinate both internal and external business functions to consistently improve business functions.  All of which provide a competitive advantage by making information transfer more accurate, useful and available.

References

General Electric Company. (2012) GE Works.  Retrieved from http://www.ge.com/#!/stories/moving-locomotives.html

Hoganson, K. (2001). Alternative curriculum models for integrating computer science and information systems analysis. Journal of Computing Sciences. New York, NY. Association for Computing.