Nike is a major publicly traded sportswear and equipment supplier based in the United States.

The company is headquartered in the Portland metropolitan area of Oregon. It is the worlds leading supplier of athletic shoes and apparel and a major manufacturer of sports equipment with revenue in excess of $16 billion USD in 2007. As of 2008, it employed over 30,000 people worldwide. Nike has contracted with more than 700 shops around the world and has offices located in 45 countries outside the United States. Most of the factories are located in Asia, including Indonesia, China, Taiwan, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, Philippines and Malaysia. 1. Due to the approach and pervasiveness of IT, organisation such as Nike operates in a much different business environment. Describe the three business issues and how those issues can dramatically affect IT in Nike (12m). 2. Evaluate the changes that are taking place in the external business environment and the internal business environment which may impact Nike (20m). 3. Discuss the evolution of the technology trends in each of hardware, software, data and communications (12m).

QUESTION 1 1. Globalisation a. Worldwide expansion of brands and the emergence of global institutions. b. As stated, Nike is a pioneer in the industry of sportswear worldwide and continues to expand across the world which shows globalisation throughout the 45 existing countries. To accommodate the business growth of Nike, the IT management must keep up with data management by deciding to centralise or decentralise information systems. 2. E-enablement a. Leveraging of IT to build relationships with consumers and other enterprises in general. b. To connect with consumers and other enterprises, Nike enables itself through global information systems and utilises the Internet as a platform to perform communications and sales with customers who have limited access to their retail stores. 3. Business intelligence a. Transfer of knowledge between people, because the most important asset in enterprises is the people and the knowledge they possess. b. Along with Nikes global presence, Nike is required to systematically manage all aspects of their resources including human resources and business knowledge such as sales performances and regional market positions. External enterprises out of the United States may share their sales information through a private intranet to support centralisation of information.

QUESTION 2 EXTERNAL 1. Internet economy a. IT underpins old and new ways of doing business b. To keep up with competitors in the sportswear market, Nike must respond accordingly with strategies such as technology-push or business-pull. For example, as trends change towards an electronic environment of sales, Nike adapts with the use of IT and e-commerce by retailing products online (B2C). 2. Global marketplace a. The internet enable companies to work globally and work around the clock by passing work from one region to the next b. Nike may take advantage of technologies such as video conferencing to communicate with their global partners; 3. Business ecosystems a. An ecosystem is a web relationship surrounding one or few companies b. Nike partners and forms web relationships with external organisations to boost their performance; amongst such organisations is DyeCoo Textile Systems B.V., a Netherlands-based company that has developed and built the first commercially available waterless textile dyeing machines. 4. Faster business cycles a. Efforts to accelerate time to market or reduce cycle time often depend on innovative uses of IT b. Nike was the first to take business initiatives with organisations such as Bluesign Technologies to accelerate the supply of sustainable materials and chemistries for the use in Nike products. INTERNAL 1. Self-service a. Customer empowerment, customers know what they want best b. Nike allows customers to place online orders as well as customise their own shoe designs according to what they require of Nikes products. 2. Real-time working a. With accurate, current information on operations, people have better information to make decisions b. Nike updates their website and social media by posting current information on promotions, sales and new products. 3. Team-based working a. People sometimes work simultaneously on several projects with different teams across different organization, is generating major interest in information systems called groupware. b. Groupware and Skype can potentially provide IT support for meetings, collaborative work and communication among team members in Nike. 4. Demise of hierarchy

a. The communication up and down the chain of command can take too much time b. As a large corporation, Nike may respond to changes of globalisation internally by shortening their chain of command between the top level management and frontline staff. This will ease information exchange in Nike. QUESTION 3 1. Hardware a. Movement of central administration to distributed computing b. Mainframe > Minicomputer > Personal Computer > Web/networks/mobile/handheld 2. Software a. Software began by emphasising the productivity of programmers in building transaction processing systems (TPS) which evolved to rigorous project management techniques with lifecycle development methodologies. b. Eventually, organisations had an option of developing in-house IS, or outsourcing systems. This led to a competition between proprietary software and open source system software. 3. Data a. Technical solutions for managing data (DBMS) > Shift toward managing information resources (data warehousing/data mining) > Web content management (XML) 4. Communication a. Enterprise networking initially had two alternatives: local area networks and wide area networks between organisation sites. b. From 1990 onwards, the Internet emerged and allowed the convergence of telecommunications and information systems.

IMNPD tutorial questions (write half page for each): 1. If two firms of the same size and the same industry invest the same amount into R&D, will they reach the same level of innovation? Explain why. 2. What is the difference between an unsuccessful innovation and an invention?