Time flies, it is time again to have a reflection of this module. In this blog, I want to review and point out some favorite parts in this module I have learned to understand the digitalization. During this period, we have learned a lot of knowledge about digital business model in the process of checking the information by ourselves.
Firstly, this module let us have a deeper understanding through the topics which from general to narrow in the whole process. From the very beginning, the assignment was to write a career that has changed in the digital economy which have a preliminary understanding of a better influence on people’s lives and work of digitalization. After that, I made a comparison with digital and physical location and describe a specific digital business model made me understand how a digital business model utilized in enterprises promoting me to have a practical understanding. Through comparison, I have some knowledge about different status of the digital model in every enterprise, just like Alibaba which I wrote it in my second blog. The advance technology and the widely successful e-commerce platform also have challenges and crises, such as competition in the same industry, consumer’s negative feedback, and it also need to take into account the development of physical economy. It turns out that only the two can succeed.
Furthermore, this module gives us opportunity to comment other blogs which is another favorite part of me. Because the enterprises analyzed by each person are different, I have learned about the benefits and challenges brought by different companies in digital and physical locations through the process of reading other people’s blogs, looking up the materials written in the articles and making my own comments.
For example, Shirly wrote that Apple made a good combination between their online shop and Chinese e-commerce platform which bring some benefits to them. Additionally, they also provided offline website which can give customers opportunity to experience products in reality. what she emphasizes in blogs that was a complementary relationship between online and offline. Besides that, I also have a discussion with Caroline on her third blog writing Airbnb using share economy as their digital business model which contribute a successful. Compared with Uber which an enterprise also uses share economy model, we discuss their differences in using digital nosiness model. In this way, we all can learn many different cases from it.
Last but not least, discussions in class which also taught me dialectically to look at the digital model is not only a benefit, but also some companies that have been successful in the real economy have failed in digital transformation like GE, which enable us to have a critical thinking.
In recent years, with the continuous development of the Internet in recent years, with the continuous development of the Internet, companies are actively introducing enterprise digital plans to expand or build digital functions and expect to improve business efficiency or revenue growth. With the emergence of successful digital transformation stories, this trend is heating up.
According to the related statistics, there are 40% of corporate technology spending has been used for digital transformation, and by 2019, corporate spending will exceed $2 trillion. However, opportunities and risks both exist. In the process of digital transformation, not all companies create their own digital business model to raise profit and promote service. There are many businesses have failed in the digital transformation, despite their success in the physical industry. Therefore, it should have special digital business models which could be appropriate to a different business.
In the communication area, Sprint can be used as a successful case to illustrate how the digital business model contributes to success. Most enterprises believe that using digital business model can decrease cost helping them to obtain more profit. There is no doubt that a digital transformation can help a company to reduce the cost, but how to use it to obtain a longer-term, better customer experience is more important for a company, which is said by the president of Sprint. Their unique digital business model helps them to improve customer experience, at the same time, increase market revenue.
Sprint—— a successful case on digital transformation
Sprint is a global communications company and it is also one of the top three U.S. carriers. It mainly provides long-distance communication, local service and mobile communication service, and provides comprehensive and multi-level wired and wireless communication service to bring consumers, merchants and governments sufficient mobile performance.
As a company in the communication industry, it is significant for the sprint to provide an excellent customer experience, so the aim of digital transformation for Sprint is how to use digital tools to analyze data which helps to improve the customer experience.
What the Sprint does to implement its digital business model, it mainly focuses on two different parts. One of them is to improve technology. To be more specific, it refers to build the company’s data architecture. By analyzing the quantity of data, it is more likely to satisfy customers’ requirement. Another field of digital transformation of the Sprint is on the internal structure which refers to set up digital marketing and product management system. It may strengthen the internal control which promotes the development of the enterprise.
As for the digital investment on technology, Sprint uses digital software to process the big data generated by logs, databases, emails and other sources to evaluate the performance of Sprint.com (Abramovich, 2018). The data help IT staff to determine which glitches are hindering Sprint’s ability to facilitate transactions, from basic browsing to phone purchases to upgrades consumers are trying to complete online. By analyzing the errors and other delays also helps Sprint to determine when and why customers are dropping deals. It is important for enterprises to know the information in transactions which could be a warning for enterprises.
Sprint also creates a data lake based on Hadoop to analyze customer data to improve the way of recommending products to consumers. The enterprise tries to summarize and analyze data from different customers’ browsing information, search results ,and other parties. After that, it recommends products to consumers according to their needs and preferences according to the results of data analysis. For example, users of Android phones for up to 10 years will receive Android phone discounts. This is about building a project about you and your relationship with us (Abramovich, 2018). Understand the needs of consumers and then provide consumers with better services. Sprint’s digital transformation applies across different aspects with the IT organization and digital technology in the middle of each project.
Besides that, Sprint also begins to strengthen its digital marketing team. They create the first in-house digital marketing agency, through using digital and programmatic managing to meet the company’s marketing needs (Matthews, 2017). In this way, it could own and control their own marketing data which may ensure more real-time decisions and guarantee that the company’s spending is highly optimized. Furthermore, Sprint also uses artificial intelligence and machines to manage products. It tries to make the product management team to be more data-driven (Matthews, 2017). For example, the Spring uses digital tools to know product inventory or after sales quality maintenance situation of products. Last but not least, Sprint’s digital transformation also has taken into account optimization of processes, it applies digital touch points to make no matter internal or external process more streamlined resulting to provide a more effective service to customers.
Conclusion
From the above-mentioned discussion, we can know that a digital business model has contributed to the success of the Sprint. In the future, Sprint will continue to focus on building digital channels and creating online experiences that allow customers to help themselves (Abramovich, 2018). However, as I mentioned before, not all business is successful in the digital model. Each enterprise has its own economic situations. It should create a unique digital business model rather than learn from others. Despite utilizing a digital business model is a trend now, it still needs to think about if it is worth for business.
In recent years, with the rapid development of the digital economy, enterprises have applied digital models to their business strategies. When we talk about the digital economy in China, the Alibaba plays a pioneering role which cannot be ignored.
Now, Alibaba’s new retail target is to form an ecosystem which can include social + local + mobile. Although the new retail model may bring them many opportunities which they do not have before, at the same time, it still has many challenges will meet (Zeng, 2018).
From its inception in 1999, Alibaba experienced great growth on its e-commerce platform. At that time, when the Internet was not very popular, Alibaba first proposed the B2B business model, which combined the retail industry with online transactions. In 2009, Alibaba orchestrated a “double 11” online marketing campaign. In this period, Alibaba has successfully grasped consumers’ online consumption psychology they attracted consumers by strengthening early online publicity, including cooperation with new media and issuing coupons, etc. Meanwhile, it has actively cooperated with more well-known brands to increase consumers’ trust in products. After nearly ten years of development, November 11 has become the shopping carnival of people in the country and even the world. Alibaba in 2018 tore through last year’s Singles Day sales record, racking up more than $30.8 billion in the 24-hour shopping event (Wade, Shan,2018).
Furthermore, Alibaba promotes the development of Alipay which is the popular mobile payment method actively. Alipay originally existed as a security guarantee for online transactions. At present, Alipay has developed from a single payment tool to provide a variety of scenarios such as payment, life service, government service, society, finance, insurance and welfare, and gradually opened the platform to cover the entire industry.
Besides that, Alibaba is now building a new retail model that combines online and offline. During the more than ten years of the development of the Internet, numerous e-commerce companies have gushed out like fountains, and the battle among e-commerce companies on the Internet has been in a white-hot stage. Therefore, more e-commerce companies are now putting more funds into offline brick-and-mortar retail. However, some critics may argue that how is this different from the original? Compared with the traditional retail, offline entity retail increases a lot of new technology which includes the use of big data, new media, etc. The Freshhema is based on this which is an offline integration supermarket with big data.
Otherwise, we realize that Alibaba’s special innovation lies in the establishment of a real ecosystem which gets social, local and mobile together leading to a new retail industrial.
As Alibaba group said:” We firmly believe that the online business world and the offline physical stores are not two separate worlds.” Today’s Alibaba is not just an online commerce company, but a vast, data-driven online retail system of sellers, marketers, service providers, logistics companies and manufacturers(Zeng, 2018).
However, it still has some challenge in Alibaba.
First, it is local Chinese rivals such as Tencent-backed JD and the low-cost Pinduoduo that recognize the opportunity to offer limited-time discounts. Both companies now have their own versions of the singles day which gives a strong impact on Alibaba’s online sales(Martin roll, 2017).
Some critics also say Alibaba is full of fake goods and illegal businesses. As for the suppliers in Alibaba, there are a more individual business rather than well-known brands leading to a huge challenge on the quality of goods. Although Alibaba has also adopted some measures in this respect like strengthen the review for merchants, it seems still doesn’t work. Therefore, it seems to be more rigorous in the selection of third-party suppliers in the future, especially in the stage of consumption upgrading and transformation. People’s consumption demand is constantly developing, which requires more high-quality products and the support of trustworthy brands can be introduced into Alibaba(Martin roll, 2017).
Moreover, as e-commerce practices online retail, offline logistics distribution is also one of the challenges faced by Alibaba. Alibaba did not have a unified distribution team before, which often led to consumers’ complaints about the logistics link. However, Amazon and JD have built their own logistics distribution team, which can provide high-quality services. Therefore, Alibaba is determined to build a logistics service network within China and globally.
Therefore, the Cainiao network came into being in May 2013, undertaking the logistics solutions of the entire Alibaba e-commerce trading platform. The Cainiao makes use of Alibaba’s big data to promote the digitization of express business, improve efficiency, and provide high-quality cross-border logistics services for merchants and buyers. Since then, Cainiao network has cooperated with a foreign post trying to realize the direct connection of information with the postal services of other countries at the export level, so as to provide one-stop logistics service of the cross-border full link.
In conclusion, under the background of internet, enterprises want to catch up with this historical opportunity to expand market share and increase their actual profits. However, it is not enough only relying on the online, especially the barrier between online and offline is declining with the use of new technology. Therefore, the integration of digital strategy and physical economy is a key element in developing the economy.
Choose a job role (or career path) with which you are familiar. In what ways has this role 1) already changed in the digital economy, and 2) be likely to change further in the future?
Max 400 words
Accounting plays a significant role in the enterprise’s operation. Lucas Pachauri believed that it was not enough to only record financial transactions for commercial purposes. It was necessary to collect, classify and summarize recorded transactions, which was done through accounting. After the confirmation of financial items, through the basic accounting treatment, it will be correctly recorded in the system books. (Chatfield & Vangermeersch, 2014) I think it is a way to communicate the financial health of a business or an organization to any and all interested parties. It is a way of assessing the assets, liabilities and cash flow, or the future of an entity for all current and future investors. (EduPristine, 2018)
In recent years, with the continuous development of the digital economy, it may be surprising to discover that the traditional role of accountants gradually disappeared in our vision, replaced by the use of accounting computerization and the era of big data management accounting. However, it does not mean the businesses no longer need accountants, but the significance and role of accountants as a profession has changed under the digital economy.
Before the development of the digital economy, the responsibility of traditional accountant is mainly to rely on manual accounting by using paper, ink and brush, abacus and other calculation tools for manual sorting, calculation, classification, registration, verification, indicators, and other administrative accounting work.
Nowadays, the responsibility of accountants is to input accounting data into the computer, into the computer, through the accounting computerization for accounting, and then get the accounting report. It helps to reduce the cost of accounting work and simplifies the workflow of accountants.
Traditionally, the accounting work needs a large number of accountants from the basic classification calculation to the final preparation and audit. The application of computerized, to a certain extent, reduced the workload of accounting staff. It can cope with more complex financial and accounting computerization processing flow effectively and it seems more convenient for the accounting staff to handle processes. It used to be necessary to carry out manual audit and error correction for the project, but now it can be easily handled by the computer which can not only improve the work efficiency, but also reduces the cost of human resources accounting work.
Image from Internet
In the future, with the large-scale computerization of accounting and the development of intelligent systems and the wide application of big data, accounting work and accounting profession will also develop towards the direction of accounting system integration, analysis and management.(Radu & Marius, 2012)
Reference:
Chatfield, M., & Vangermeersch, R. (2014). The history of accounting (RLE accounting): an international encylopedia. Routledge.
Radu, D., & Marius, D. (2012). Changes caused by computerization in accounting management. Annals of the University of Oradea, Economic Science Series, 21, 655-661.h
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