Innovation at the International Foods

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Josh Novak who owns a small company called Glow Foods, have been selected to be apart of International Foods Group (IFG) team. IFG Tower was Chicago landmark and part of the company’s logo that appeared at every type of food that existed such as cereal box, breakfast meals, snack foods, etc. There are a lot of differences between Glow Foods, and IFG. In addition, John Ahern (CIO) would like to add more customers to IFG, merging the two Glow Foods and IFG.

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The goal is to attract the youth and young adult markets in IT.

Josh was called to meet up with John Ahern and Tonya (manager of IT marketing) to talk. They started to talk about baseball teams, and the weather. Later on, John started to get to business; John summarized that since they took over Glow Foods they completely thought of arranging their processes including IT. They did not see a reason to run separate data centers. They picked a team to transfer all of Glow Foods’ hardware and software to their corporate systems in a month.

Also change their entire Mac’s to PC’s, train employees on ERP system, and keep a small team to deal with Canadian issues.

With that being said, IFG’s market their products to women with children and would like to expand and market their products to youths and young adults. John Ahern chose Josh Novack to help grab the youth and young adult customers. There is a team that will help Josh with this project stationed in Chicago.

Josh is now the team manager at IFG and in charge of this project to be implemented and result in success. Six weeks after Josh started; he was called to come to Tonya’s office to discuss a few things.

Since not everyone in the company is encouraging there will be some serious obstacles to overcome that will need to be discussed and that is both within the IT and the larger company. Tonya will assist Josh the best way she can when it comes to resources, support and to help place Josh’s innovative ideas together. Some serious obstacles that were discussed are expectations, and appearance. There is a possibility that IFG may have different expectations than Glow Foods. Usually, employers hire people based on their skills, interviews, eferences, and presentation. Employers expect them that they are being honest about the type of person that they are, and they want to work for them. Each boss that a person will have all have different expectations to their employees, as they all have different management style, rules, and personality. In reality, there are also expectations of the general work that a person will do, the environment in which they will be working at and the way that they will be interacting with others in workplace. (CITE)

Through experience and research there are common expectations that companies would like their employees to meet. Common expectations are being on time to scheduled work, following supervisor’s directions, maintaining a positive attitude at all times, treat everyone around you with respect, being responsible, and doing your roles. These expectations are usually told to all employees or kept to themselves knowing. Meeting the company’s expectations will help people progress in the company. With all employees meeting expectations, this will maintain the company be successful. CITE) The second part of the serious obstacle to overcome is appearance. Tonya stated that Josh may find that he will get a better response to his ideas if he looks a bit more professional. Just like expectations all companies have their own set of rules when it comes to dressing for work and can be called uniform. Just like police officers have uniforms, so once you see a police officer you will it is a police officer by appearance. Also when we see people with suits and tie we normally think that they are CEO’s, CIO’s, or Managers.

With appearance, an employee can gained more respect from co workers, build self confidence, and also can lead to opportunities. (CITE) Josh can win support for his team’s three point plan to use technology to help IFG’s reach its customers by doing a test to all three ideas and documenting step by step progress and results. In addition, writing a risk evaluation and analysis will help back up any questions that CIO, and CTO may have (John and Rick). Also, a business case should already be in place as well as budget with the technologies needed on both ends, whether the three point plan works or not.

Having all of the information in hand will help the team gain some support. Also, think of all of the questions that both John and Rick will ask and look for and include the answers into the plan. This will help gain John and Rick’s support because the ideas were well thought of. Of course, the team will not be able to think off all the questions that John and Rick may have in mind but it will help. In addition, making sure that all the business needs and requirements are met.

This is important because it will make the three point plan strong and will help gain support for the team. Here are some ideas that can help each idea gain some support for team. First idea is connecting directly with customers about new product development ideas through an interactive web site with real time response from internal staff. Outlining the cost for this, the number of staff that will be needed for real time response will help, and who will be responsible for the creation of the web site. Also, have the completed GUI or interface of the website ready to show.

It looks like this is going to be a 24 hour support, since it is real time response, there should be some guidelines and training needed for the employees that will be assisting and in charge of the real time response to customers. With this being said, listing all possible risk with mitigation actions, and basically writing a risk analysis just for this idea. Wonderful customer service will continue to keep coming back. Second idea is to reach out to different communities and gain insights into their needs and interests. With this idea, an informative survey would help.

Outlining all questions and possible answers to help guide future marketing plans. Also, having a set schedule of how this reaching out to people would be implemented for example, knowing what location, what employees will assist, is this web based survey (if so, how will customers be notified), etc. these are a few questions that can help marketing. In addition, flyers, and advertisements at locations where youths hang out the most, and/or events that are attended the most by young adults. Also, knowing what is next after gathering information and/or knowing the results will help the team.

Third idea is to implement these and all of the ideas on the cloud. Now, with this idea, there should be another risk analysis. Putting information on the cloud involves a lot of security issues, but also has an advantage to companies. With technology booming every second, a lot of companies are putting their information on the cloud. Listing all possible security issues and how it can be solved will help. Knowing all of the details about the cloud, any credentials that are needed, any firewall rules, monitoring ports, and traffic will help this idea.

In conclusion, in my opinion integrating IT into marketing is an innovative idea. Nowadays, everything includes or involves IT whether it is financial department, or marketing department. Information technology is embedded in modern marketing jobs. There are IT tools used everyday by marketing personnel such as blogs, email communication, CRM systems, power point presentations, websites, social medias to name a few. Over all without these IT tools, it will be hard to keep marketing updated and to continue to maintain and gain customers. Using these IT tools help the company markets successful.