Casa Del Libro

From my previous experience all I need to solve such a case is to draw a decision tree evaluating the different possibilities and the amount of money allocated to each decision. then I'll estimate the probability of each decision multiplied by the amount required to execute such decision. the tree will give us the cost of every decision and the allocated probability.
I use Palisade products because they were recommended by my Quantitative analysis professor but there are a lot of other programs that can give you the same service and are for free. to be successful in the world of business one should not be afraid of using all the tools available. for such an application we will need the estimated cost of each action. (1- redesigning the old platform. 2- buying, installing the new platform, 3- not doing anything) keeping in mind the probability of success of each platform.

the situation in 2001 is not so far from the situation that we are experiencing these days. the future is uncertain and any company in this situation will face 2 decisions: either invest and expect the bad wave to pass and u'll harvest what you have planted. or you just hide not invest and keep the status quo until the storm passes.

historically as we have learned from the burst of the internet bubble in the beginning of the 21st century, during bad times big financially comfortable companies invest heavily so they can ride the wave from the beginning when things start getting better (off course they would they can afford it), while small companies stop all investments and keep all planes on the tarmac until things get better.

therefore my opinion a good decision considering that the online business of casadellibro.com was not that strong and not that known it is not wise to invest more and occur more expenses while we don't know if the result is going to be positive. based on this analysis I will not advise the new CEO to make any decision neither to invest in a new platform nor to invest in redeveloping the existing one.

for sure the CEO will not come up with such a noble decision that will most probably risk his career but in my opinion that is what should be done. keep the old system and not invest even in modifications until the economic overview is better.

On the other hand the Criteria that the company defined for the Platform performance were:

high performance: as defined by wikipedia, it is the amount of useful work that is executed with in a give time and using a given resources. usually high performance is measured with a computer's Short response time for a given piece of work High throughput (rate of processing work), Low utilization of computing resource, Fast (or highly compact) data compression and decompression, High bandwidth / short data transmission time


security: the systems ability to stop attacks, viruses hackers… from intentionally disrupting the process of the work as seen previously this can be done by software means (Antivirus, Firewall…) or by physical means (update policies…)

availability: the time where the system is available for utilization. the system theoretically is supposed to work 24/7. while it is more common with smaller systems PC's, laptops… to have system errors these errors are (should be) fewer in a bigger capacity system: Server...

scalability: again our friends in wikipedia indicate the following about scalability the ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or to be readily enlarged.

on the other hand I would add the following criteria:

General Economic forecast: if the CEO keeps on focused on the informational details without considering the future market forecasts and evaluating future risk then he should not be a CEO. it is the the job of department managers to worry about technical details while it is the job of the CEO to look at all the other details especially the environment where the company is operating to back his decisions.

Cost of change: a criterion that was rightfully not discussed (since a lot of organizations discard it, and only few institutions like Instituto de Empresa make sure to pass it to their students) is the cost of change and the time and money that it will take to develop the new program (in the case the company will adopt the new program) and the time and cost that it will take people to adapt to it. from different experiences we can get that this is a very high cost that most of the time if ignored leeds to organizational failure.