Assignment 2: Employing Strategy in a Competitive Environment

   Due Week 4 and worth 280 points

   This assignment builds upon on the strategy elements created Assignment 1.

   Write a four to eight (4-8) page paper in which you:

       Create an environmental scan for the company indicating the most significant environmental threats and discuss how the company should respond to each threat to ensure that the impact to the business is minimal.

 A key to success for any organization is planning, and successful planning requires that the people involved have a comprehensive understanding of their current environment. Environmental Scanning is used to establish the level of understanding needed for a successful strategic plan. In order to conduct an Environmental Scan conducted by collecting pieces of external and internal information to assist in focusing on the appropriate short and long-term goals.

 LATEST INTELLIGENCE: Easy, highly mobile, and social are the mantras of this new generation of IT. So to is the rapid (read: instant) acquisition and delivery of business solutions. There is a growing realization amongst workers and management that technology, though increasingly complex in itself, can be wielded far more rapidly and efficiently than their currently parochial capabilities are providing. The ability to quickly connect, communicate, and collaborate

 via social conversations, photos, audio, video, and more with anyone in the world is much more limited currently in most businesses. Finding and acquiring new software is just the click of a button in an app store in the consumer world, but an arduous, manual, and failure prone process in most organizations now. User experiences are changing: The aging and slow-to-evolve graphical user interface is being uprooted by touch based interfaces in new consumer apps that work much better in many physical situations. In contrast, the same overhaul is happening an order of magnitude more slowly for business apps.

 IDENTIFIED WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT NEEDS:

       Based on the environmental scan, evaluate the company’s strengths and evaluate how the company can leverage these strengths so as to yield a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

       Identify a significant competitor for the company and assess how your company will compete against it to maximize profits and create value for stakeholders.

       Assume that the U.S. economy is in a state of decline requiring modifications to the strategy. Evaluate how the strategy should be modified. Provide a justification of how this will help the company continue to compete in the marketplace.

       Evaluate how global competition may impact the business strategy and determine how the company should respond.