Issues

Discuss about the Globalization and Expansion of Businesses.

Business success is truly dependent on the various decision criteria’s that businesses make. Every business has its own issues and challenges that it faces and then adopts various decision criteria have to overcome the same. Decision criteria play an important in every business function, and challenges faced. The major decision criteria that a company faces are in regards to increasing its market share and profitability. In order to attend to the same various possible strategic alternatives are evaluated by the company. The report has been written in broad perspective involving the various steps of decision criteria incorporating in specifics from Adobe case study in the video. The analysis has been done on the basis of interview given by Stephen Hamill, Managing Director of Adobe for South East Asia. The issues that he had highlighted and the potential causes for the issue and then subsequently the various alternatives adopted by the company is also highlighted in the analysis. In the end implementation and implication for the decision criteria has been applied.

Companies globally are facing a wide range of issues for which they need to develop a decision criterion. The decisions needs to be specific to the issues and challenges faced in businesses. The various issues that businesses face today in the dynamic environment are in regards to financial, marketing, environmental, human resources and so on. The complexity and range of problems are dependent on the organization. an ideal example of an issue faced by a leading software manufacturer is Adobe, which was established in the year 1982. Since inception it focused on the strong customer base and partner relationships.

The Adobe software was the outcome of the efforts made by John Warnock and Chuck Geschke. Since last 25 years adobe has proved its excellence in capturing wider market, like any other companies adobe has been the leading market player in software business but the major issue lied on shaping the business how to make a successful company like Adobe a more bigger and successful company and capture the widest market share in the coming years. When the company is able to deal with this issue then it is also able to increase its share price in the market and attract a wide range of investors. The major considerations while dealing with a pertinent issue in business is to account for its ethical consideration built into the decision criteria.

Causes

Causes forms an important and integral part of the decision criteria as the underlying origins of the problems needs to be determined. Causes for the issues in decision criteria may reflect origins specific to the issues or any surrounding issues. In order to focus on the causes and take out relevant data proper analysis and understanding of the company problem is must.   

The major cause of issue in Adobe was market saturation, where the company existing volume of services and products has reached the maximized state. Adobe in its current market needs to develop a new innovative product for further growth and development. As a result Adobe came up with biotechnology method for its large customer base. The challenge faced by the company was to reach the customer base as this professional technology was very expensive to afford. Many customers did not buy this technology as they used to operate the pirated versions as the piracy rate was very high. Lack of legal right to the product made it more difficult for customers to access the technology and hence greatly decreased the popularity for this product. This cause was the major potential threat for Adobe in its decreasing market share as well as share price.

In decision criteria for organizations when a particular issue is faced then the causes for the issues is analyzed. All the several causes post their analysis, alternative courses of actions is prepared. These alternatives form the basis of the solutions to the challenges the company is currently facing. Alternatives depends upon the choice of the business leaders, an ethical organization is more likely to follow an alternative that yields value based solution. Similarly a business that follows or is more prone to unethical course of action might not consider value systems.

While analyzing the case problem for Adobe it has been seen that the company is facing immense challenges in regards to its market. Whenever Adobe comes up with a new product customers starts struggling to get the pirated version of it to avoid paying thousands of dollars to acquire the original software. But in order to combat this situation Adobe has come up with a new technology which is not packed and sold in boxes but which is a subscription package of cloud model which were made available to the customers at very reasonable rate. This product could not be pirated as the original versions are available at a reasonable price, hence customers can have the ownership of the original adobe product.

Alternatives

Though piracy still exists, Adobe needs to provide excellent service in order to get the stickiness of their customers. Adobe can also consider lowering the price of its existing products. The delivery of cloud based technologies, its services and transferring of files via mobile app from one mobile to another requires a subscription plan. With the lower subscription price Adobe can minimize the piracy of its software, by converting customers to use the original version. The winning edge over piracy can only be achieved when the company provides excellent services to increase customer satisfaction and grow into a much bigger company. These are the various alternatives considered by the Adobe in order to face the challenges faced by it. Accordingly various businesses will have various problems and alternative courses for solutions. It is only pertinent to select the correct alternative that incorporates in ethical norms and procedures.

The decision criteria for any business issue is dependent on the above steps of diagnosing issues, then finding relevant causes and final arrival of the solution to the problem. Each of the decision criteria decided upon by the company is based on several strategic choices that the company makes for its various processes. The decision criteria involve evaluating major strategic alternatives for the company. The best decision at the end of the process is selected that encompasses company’s vision, mission and norms. The below table reflects the decision criteria’s that businesses needs to consider prior to their application in business.

Table 1 : Decision Criteria

Source : 21

Recommended solutions are totally dependent on the decision criteria and evaluation of the alternative courses of action. Every business decision is primarily taken up by senior members of the business along with their shareholders view of the same. It is always acceptable that business leaders adopt strategies and solutions that are beneficial to business performances. Business ethics and corporate responsibility norms needs to build into each and every aspect of recommendation. Recommendations is totally dependent on the type of business, the expectations that stakeholders of business holds for it and the strategic goals for the organization.

In the case study for Adobe, Adobe Photoshop has been a major booster towards the revenue earnings of the company. The company has moved up from providing desktop technology and software to a technology provider for larger business enterprises .The cloud subscription launched by Adobe has led to the decrease in piracy with its presence and accessibility in the market at reasonable prices and outstanding services. Adobe Livcycle, a family product which helps business to manage the information flow within the organization in a secured manner. Adobe Integrated runtime (AIR) has the capability to transform the web applications into a branded desktop application which can be accessed online, offline and at occasionally environment.

Decision criteria

Adobe reader is the most widely used product which is easily available online and are accessed in office laptop, computers and desktops at every level. Adobe flash player had aided the user to create and work on advance multimedia contents on digital platform. The company has successful in laying down the industry standards and is accepted and recognized globally. Adobe creative designs help the industries to outperform in laying down the creativity workflow which further increases the revenue of adobe. Adobe also acquired Adobe shockwave and Flash making adobe the largest software company with designed products.

Any decision criteria selected by the company needs to be implemented in order to yield appropriate results. The implications will be dependent on the decision criteria made and implementation of the same. In the implementation phase for the case study example, Adobe analytics implementation includes terms, code and information on how data is collected. The implementation is best understood by;

• Reports and report suits – It is a complete independent reporting set on a chosen website or web pages. The global segment can be combined to get several numbers of sites but usually a report suit is one website.
• Metrics – It is the foundation of reports which let you understand data relationship and side by side gives information about comparison of data sets about your website.
• Analytics code-Here the Java Script implementation is used to send data to Analytics. In report suit data is sent to display in reporting.
• Data Collection –Through Adobe multiple ways were created to send data into Analytics. The methods or techniques used in tracking information from websites, client-server applications, kiosks, emails, mobile devices etc. can access internet.
• Marketing Cloud Debugger- The Digital Pulse Debugger or Adobe Debugger is a tool which is provided by Adobe is a free tool which enables to view the collected data from the site on any given page.

Adobe being a single – user software anticipated several market trends-from universal print language to distribution of electronic documents. Adobe products have created relationship in an organization between partners and customers. Adobe in future will come up with new avenues for collaboration using its interactive documents like Acrobat and PDF9Portable Document Format.

References

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