1st Workshop Output

The purpose of this workshop was to identify the supply and sell sides of the organization and provide an initial idea of the technologies that we found as most appropriate, after a first level scanning of WOU’s environment.
The most important parts of the environment scanning are as followed:

EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

The external environment of a company consists of the Macro and Micro or Sector environment. We conducted a small preliminary research to come up with any Opportunities(+) or Threats(-) that we should be aware of at this initial phase of e-business adoption.

Macro Environment
• POLITICAL VIEWS (+) member of MercosurTradingCorporation (Can help our suppliers export xines more easily)
• ECONOMIC VALUES (+) Good banking services in Uruguay (Can help us with suppliers transactions)
• SOCIO CULTURAL ASPECT (-) Uruguay not well known in UK (Diminish this threat with effective advertising of Uruguay through the site)
• TECHNOLOGICAL (+) new and evolving ICT (Can provide huge push to transforming and redesigning business procedures of WOU)

Sector Environment
• SUPPLIERS (+) Small suppliers’ power, Lots of wineries (Ability to select the best and more IT developed suppliers)
• CLIENTS (+) plenty wine lovers in UK (Big target group, lots of opportunities)
• COMPETITORS (-) Argentina, Chile, USA, Australia, France, South Africa etc. (Immense competition, have to find the most suitable ICT solutions to be effective and gain acces to market)
• SUBSTITUTE (-) Beer (Diminish this threat with the right wine vs beer advertising through site)

INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

We also made a small research of WOU's internas environment to identify possible Strengths(+) or Weaknesses(-).
• Resources: Few personnel units, Warehouse, Few mini vans , Online site, (-)Small funds.
• Unique Attributes (+) GREAT wine from Uruguay, rare popular Tannat variety, Innovative selling procedures


After the above analysis we came up to a business model presented in the uploaded picture


Wikinomics Reference
Furthermore we considered of the third chapter of the Wikinomics book (Tapscott and Williams, 2007) as a good source of inspiration, in order to come up with constructive ideas of involving technologies to the project. More specifically, feedback with the customers will be encouraged through online social networks and the blog feature of the site, as well as reviews of wine critics. Also the use of open source technologies like MySql, PHP, Apache from our part will be a positive and useful (in terms of cost effectiveness) approach to the peer contribution model suggested in the chapter.