Criteria: Responses to the discussion should be specific and assess whether the posting accurately and sufficiently addresses the questions asked in the discussion topic. Explain your assessment as to why the information is or is not correct and/or complete, providing correct information to enhance the discussion.

Discussion Question: The company I would like to discuss today is the tech giant Google, which is owned by Alphabet. When you think of Google, it basically is the universal information system. Their mission statement is "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" (Google) Since the beginning in a garage in Palo Alto in 1995, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were able to build this search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual web pages on the world wide web. Did you know that Google was originally called "Backrub"? Google now sells for $1,085 a share and is worth a $747 billion dollars, which is only second to Apple,

Google has been so successful due to the nature of its information systems. Not just the hardware and computer processing, but through the people and the process of disseminating information on a global scale. "Information systems are interrelated components working together to collect, process, store, and disseminate information to support decision making, coordination, control, analysis, and visualization in an organization" (Bourgeois, 2014) One of the information systems that Google uses is called Bigtable. Bigtable is a distributed storage system that is designed to scale to a very large size. This includes web indexing, the function of Google Earth and Google Finance. Even though it has many varied demands, Bigtable has proven to be a flexible and high performance solution to use. It is built on GFS or Google File System, which is used to store data files for reliable storage. When you think of a company with all of this hardware and software that changes the world, and then you just give it away for free, seems bizarre right? Yes, Google makes money off advertisements and other products, but their main Information System, and they offer it freely to the world anywhere with an internet connection.I think the movie The Internship sheds a little light on the thought process of Google employees, and shows their outside of the box process of working with people and not being just some giant server farm with no face. And as we learned in the reading, people are just as important to software or hardware or any technology in the whole scheme of how a company uses information systems.

The Strategic Planning Process is broken down into 5 main topics. They are Mission and Objectives, Environmental Scan, Strategy Formulation, Strategy Implementation, and Evaluation and Control. First you need to know what direction you want your business to go or the vision, with that you can create a mission statement and decide which strategic objectives to go after. Once you have identified your strengths and weaknesses, you know what to improve on, and what is working for your business to give you a competitive advantage over your rivals. The strategic process is always changing with the introduction of new technology and the way we do business, so it needs to be constantly reevaluated and make necessary changes to go along with your business plan.

References:

Bourgeois, D. T. (2014). Information Systems for Business and Beyond – Saylor Academy. Retrieved May 22, 2018, from https://www.saylor.org/site/textbooks/

Our company | Google. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.google.com/about/our-company/

The Strategic Planning Process. (2010). Retrieved May 22, 2018, from http://www.quickmba.com/strategy/strategic-plannin…