Introduction
Majority of large organizations in the contemporary world are faced with many critical and high risk decisions characterized by high volume of data. For such organizations to compete favorably in the market, they need to use the data they collect with a lot of precision for accurate and quick decision making. For this reason, large organizations rely on analytics to speed up decision making while minimizing risks. According to Khurana and Verma (2013, p. 30), cloud computing is one of the major advancements in the field of information technology. Saas, IaaS, and PaaS are some of the service models that cloud computing is based on. The first part of this paper discusses the importance of analytics in their context and how information can be used to provide an added value to management, using Procter and Gamble as the case study. The second part of the paper analyzes the advantages that SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS entail for modern organizations, using Microsoft as the case study.
Importance of Analytics
Founded in 1837, Procter and Gamble has been one of the successful businesses in the world. The company largely focuses on innovation as it strives to provide customers with quality goods such as candles and soaps. Products of Procter and Gamble are used by close to 4.2 billion customers located in 180 countries of the world. Procter and Gamble’s organizational structure is characterized by four self-governing global organizations namely; market development organizations, global business services, global business units, and corporate functions. Just recently, Filippo Passerini, the Group President of the company’s Global Business Services supported the implementation of IDS hoping that the new technological system would assist the organization’s leaders to perform much of the analytics and make data as accessible as possible. For quite a long time now, analytics has assisted Procter and Gamble leaders to use information to add value to management.
Analytics is very important to modern organizations in various ways. First, analytics speeds up decision making in large organizations which generate huge volumes of data (Orrick 2012, p. 2). According to Orrick (2012), analytics is very important to organizations as it improves strategic decision making by providing actual information for the entire corporation. For example, with IDS implemented at Procter and Gamble, the company’s leaders have now eliminated the need for debating the data that the company generates. Instead, these leaders concentrate on business and decisions that help the company to move forward. This minimizes the time spent on decision making which has helped the company to make improvement on marketing (Devenport, Inasiti and Serels, 2013, p. 5).
Second, analytics is one of the methods through which a company can standardize the manner in which data is visualized across different business units (Kumar, Morstatter and Liu, 2013, p. 75). In the case of Procter and Gamble, IDS assists the company to generate numerous reports automatically across its business units. In addition, IDS helps Procter and Gamble to perform basic data analyses that help to standardize how the company visualizes data (Devenport, Inasiti and Serels, 2013, p. 5).
Third, analytics is important to modern organizations because it assists them to respond appropriately to the needs of various business units especially for large organizations that operate large busineses. In the given case, IDS has enabled Procter and Gamble to respond effectively to the needs of its Global Business Units and Market Development Organizations. With the IDS, Procter and Gamble uses analyzed data to build out strong solutions that are used to enhance performance in multiple markets (Devenport, Inasiti and Serels, 2013, p. 5). This explains how information can be used to provide an added value to management.
Specifically, information can be used to gain a comprehensive understanding of every employee which helps a company to make appropriate human resource management decisions. In addition, with the help of analytics, a company can use information to focus on business models that can enable it to make forecasts for product-market combinations across all its business units. This way, a company can use information to facilitate supply chain management, human resource management, marketing management, and production management (Devenport, Inasiti and Serels, 2013, p. 8).
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