Vermont Teddy Bear (VTB) is a private company that was founded by John Sortino in 1981. It has its headquarters in Shelburne, Vermont.
At around 1990, the company almost filed for bankruptcy, however, Sortino introduced the “Bear Gram” service, which allowed customers to call a toll-free number and order a personalized teddy bear (Gogan & Lewis, 2011). This move recuperated the company. The company manufactures and markets bears, pajamas (hoodie footies), and flowers around the world. It has succeeded in establishing a global presence by marketing its products via both its one red-brick store and online platforms. This has been aided by the use of an array of technologies that comprise the use of Circle Commerce for order management and fulfillment, Platinum to handle accounting, FusionRetail for its retail store, and other small one-off applications connected by middleware (Gogan & Lewis, 2011).
The VTB organizational structure is flat and horizontal. A Board of Directors heads the company, and this is followed by the Chief Executive Officer, John Gilbert. Therefore, every move that the company makes has to be approved by both the CEO and the Board of Directors (Islam, Jasimuddin, & Hasan, 2015). The head office has several departments and departmental heads, ranging from accounts to Information Technology (IT). Each departmental head has a team of junior employees working on specific job assignments. VTB has 200 employees and occasionally hires additional temporary employees during the peak seasons, which include Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day (Gogan & Lewis, 2011). Communication at VTB is facilitated through both formal channels; for instance, in internal communication, John Gilbert often walks around the office to see how the staff is doing. He talks to employees and discusses their progress at work. On the other hand, in external communication, the company uses Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to communicate with its customers.
Customer Profile
VTB targets individuals, both locally and overseas. It targets both children and adults who take comfort in simple pleasures and are family-oriented. However, the ideal customer includes individuals 50 years and above middle-class male individuals.
IT Values
Knowledge is an essential organizational asset that enables companies to gain and maintain a competitive advantage. In the customer relationship management paradigm, the management of customer data in eCommerce is necessary, and this is facilitated by the creation and adherence to distinct IT policies (Rahimi & Kozak, 2017). With regards to VTB, an ideal IT architecture document is that which describes the network configuration, servers, data flows, and major enterprise applications (Gogan & Lewis, 2011). This is because since VTB is e-commerce, it heavily depends on IT for strategic operations. Overall, the IT architecture document in VTB was incomplete, for instance, with regards to the intellectual property rights, VTB uses “open source” CRM systems that consist of a variety of small one-off applications and software that allowed the programmers to modify their codes extensively with minimal restrictions (Gogan & Lewis, 2011).
Second, in terms of the privacy policy, VTB uses middleware, which is the black box, to translate data among different applications. Yet, it contains a substantial amount of undocumented business logic. Hence, this might compromise the privacy of data. Third, the companies used a “best-of-breed” approach to develop and acquire enterprise applications. Moreover, the presence of passwords ensured that technology access was restricted to authorized users. Fourth, VTB ensured the accuracy of the data is stored by acquiring separate enterprise resource planning packages that guarantee optimal efficiency in their given paradigm. Fifth, by embracing good password management practices and recovery mechanisms, VTB can ensure data accessibility while at the same time ensuring data security. Lastly, VTB lacks a proper data governance policy.
Internal Standards
VTB has weak internal rules and standards governing information technology. First and foremost, the IT department had not developed a formal IT process nor prepared an architecture document. Additionally, the department had haphazardly developed and installed several applications to attend to the needs of the department when there were insufficient resources. There were also poor documentation practices in that most of the essential information regarding the operation of the information systems was undocumented; hence, it could be easily lost when an employee left VTB. Lastly, some of the applications were outdated and were often edited; thus, interfering with their efficacy. Nevertheless, the department embraced good practices in password management and recovery mechanisms.
IT Vision and Mission
IT Vision
The customers of the IT department include VTB’s employees and customers. Therefore, the ideal vision of the IT department in VTB is to provide an environment that is characterized by “IT abundance,” in which IT infrastructure and services are innovative are readily available and used to provide seamless support to the company’s evolving business requirements and long-term strategic and organizational goals. By performing these functions, the IT department will enable VTB to attain a family-focused “comfort” strategy in the eyes of its customers.
IT Mission
In support of the VTB, the role of the IT department is to fulfill the business’ goals and objectives efficiently. In addition, they facilitate the day-to-day usage of employees in other departments, such as in accounting and order management, and fulfillment. Therefore, the ideal mission of the IT department in the VTB is:
To embrace the use of quality analytic tools to facilitate better data integration; thus, making it easier to coordinate marketing, forecasting, and production, and improve the stability and reliability of the eCommerce platform.
References
Gogan, J. L., & Lewis, M. (2011). Peak experiences and strategic IT alignment at Vermont Teddy Bear. Journal of Information Technology Teaching Cases, 1, 61-70. Web.
Islam, M., Jasimuddin, S., & Hasan, I. (2015). Organizational culture, structure, technology infrastructure and knowledge sharing: Empirical evidence from MNCs based in Malaysia. VINE, 45(1), 67-88. Web.
Rahimi, R., & Kozak, M. (2017). Impact of customer relationship management on customer satisfaction: The case of a budget hotel chain. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 34(1), 40-51. Web.