In the rapidly evolving digital era, businesses undergo profound transformations requiring strategic adaptation and optimization. Digital Business and Optimizing Operating Strategies delves into the intricate interplay between digital technology and business strategies, exploring various facets such as management, marketing, finance, human resources, and more within the digital market structure. This comprehensive book critically examines enterprises' skills, productivity, and adaptability in response to technological advancements and customer expectations. Covering a wide range of sub-topics, this book addresses the management of social media applications, the technological capabilities of human resources, digital sustainability, and the integration of artificial intelligence technology. By highlighting opportunities and challenges, the book serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners across diverse disciplines, offering novel perspectives and cutting-edge practices in the digital business landscape. This book is designed to resonate with a diverse audience, and will appeal to researchers, marketing managers, metaverse enthusiasts, website designers and developers, e-commerce practitioners, social media users, consumer behavior and marketing researchers, and brand experts. It is an essential resource for both undergraduate and graduate students while also serving as a valuable reference for professionals in the field.

Digital transformation is not about technology--it's about change. In the rapidly changing digital economy, you can't succeed by merely tweaking management practices that led to past success. And yet, while many leaders and managers recognize the threat from digital--and the potential opportunity--they lack a common language and compelling framework to help them assess it and guide them in responding. They don't know how to think about their digital business model. In this concise, practical book, MIT digital research leaders Peter Weill and Stephanie Woerner provide a powerful yet straightforward framework that has been field-tested globally with dozens of senior management teams. Based on years of study at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), the authors find that digitization is moving companies' business models on two dimensions: from value chains to digital ecosystems, and from a fuzzy understanding of the needs of end customers to a sharper one. Looking at these dimensions in combination results in four distinct business models, each with different capabilities. The book then sets out six driving questions, in separate chapters, that help managers and executives clarify where they are currently in an increasingly digital business landscape and highlight what's needed to move toward a higher-value digital business model. Filled with straightforward self-assessments, motivating examples, and sharp financial analyses of where profits are made, this smart book will help you tackle the threats, leverage the opportunities, and create winning digital strategies.

As hyper-personalization has yet to be perfected, developing hyper-personalized strategies presents a critical challenge; due to this, optimizing hyper-personalization and designing new processes and business models takes center stage in tourism and hospitality to reach new levels of customer service and experience through the introduction and development of new solutions supported in the internet of things, software interfaces, artificial intelligence solutions, back-end and front-end management tools, and other emergent business intelligence strategies. Optimizing Digital Solutions for Hyper-Personalization in Tourism and Hospitality serves as an essential reference source that emphasizes the importance of hyper-personalization models, processes, strategies, and issues within tourism and hospitality fields with a particular focus on digital IT solutions. More than a simple starting point for a critical reflection on the state of the art of this sector, this book aims to contribute in an objective way to leveraging digital solutions to optimize the concept of hyper-personalization in the tourist experience. The content of this book covers research topics that include digital tourism and hospitality, consumer behavior, customer journey, and smart technologies and is ideal for professionals, executives, hotel managers, event coordinators, restaurateurs, travel agents, tour directors, policymakers, government officials, industry professionals, researchers, students, and academicians in the fields of tourism and hospitality management, marketing, and communications.

Operations Management for Executives reveals all that managers should know to be able to turn the operations of their companies into a source of competitive advantage. Understanding operations is key to improve how any organization actually works. In fact, excellence and innovation in operations have played an essential role in many of the great success business stories of our time: Zara, Ikea, Dell, Amazon, Toyota, Alibaba. In this book, the authors explain operations management from a general management standpoint. They provide a practical guidebook focused on: •Understanding the key concepts and methodologies •Avoiding unnecessary technicalities•Analyzing the impact of operations in all areas of a company•Revealing key levers to help managers realize the full potential of their companies. This book covers traditional areas in operations management, such as process design, capacity analysis, inventory management and queueing theory, or quality management. In addition, you’ll find advanced topics such as lean management, procurement, supply chain management, as well as aspects that are seldom addressed in other operations books, such as project management, human and organizational factors in operations, and operations innovation.

A practical approach to business transformation Fit for Growth* is a unique approach to business transformation that explicitly connects growth strategy with cost management and organization restructuring. Drawing on 70-plus years of strategy consulting experience and in-depth research, the experts at PwC’s Strategy& lay out a winning framework that helps CEOs and senior executives transform their organizations for sustainable, profitable growth. This approach gives structure to strategy while promoting lasting change. Examples from Strategy&’s hundreds of clients illustrate successful transformation on the ground, and illuminate how senior and middle managers are able to take ownership and even thrive during difficult periods of transition. Throughout the Fit for Growth process, the focus is on maintaining consistent high-value performance while enabling fundamental change. Strategy& has helped major clients around the globe achieve significant and sustained results with its research-backed approach to restructuring and cost reduction. This book provides practical guidance for leveraging that expertise to make the choices that allow companies to: Achieve growth while reducing costs Manage transformation and transition productively Create lasting competitive advantage Deliver reliable, high-value performance Sustainable success is founded on efficiency and high performance. Companies are always looking to do more with less, but their efforts often work against them in the long run. Total business transformation requires total buy-in, and it entails a series of decisions that must not be made lightly. The Fit for Growth approach provides a clear strategy and practical framework for growth-oriented change, with expert guidance on getting it right. *Fit for Growth is a registered service mark of PwC Strategy& Inc. in the United States

This book examines issues and implications of digital and social media marketing for emerging markets. These markets necessitate substantial adaptations of developed theories and approaches employed in the Western world. The book investigates problems specific to emerging markets, while identifying new theoretical constructs and practical applications of digital marketing. It addresses topics such as electronic word of mouth (eWOM), demographic differences in digital marketing, mobile marketing, search engine advertising, among others. A radical increase in both temporal and geographical reach is empowering consumers to exert influence on brands, products, and services. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and digital media are having a significant impact on the way people communicate and fulfil their socio-economic, emotional and material needs. These technologies are also being harnessed by businesses for various purposes including distribution and selling of goods, retailing of consumer services, customer relationship management, and influencing consumer behaviour by employing digital marketing practices. This book considers this, as it examines the practice and research related to digital and social media marketing.

Harnessing the power of software platforms: what executives and entrepreneurs must know about how to use this technology to transform industries and how to develop the strategies that will create value and drive profits. Software platforms are the invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century. They power everything from mobile phones and automobile navigation systems to search engines and web portals. They have been the source of enormous value to consumers and helped some entrepreneurs build great fortunes. And they are likely to drive change that will dwarf the business and technology revolution we have seen to this point. Invisible Engines examines the business dynamics and strategies used by firms that recognize the transformative power unleashed by this new revolution—a revolution that will change both new and old industries. The authors argue that in order to understand the successes of software platforms, we must first understand their role as a technological meeting ground where application developers and end users converge. Apple, Microsoft, and Google, for example, charge developers little or nothing for using their platforms and make most of their money from end users; Sony PlayStation and other game consoles, by contrast, subsidize users and make more money from developers, who pay royalties for access to the code they need to write games. More applications attract more users, and more users attract more applications. And more applications and more users lead to more profits. Invisible Engines explores this story through the lens of the companies that have mastered this platform-balancing act. It offers detailed studies of the personal computer, video game console, personal digital assistant, smart mobile phone, and digital media software platform industries, focusing on the business decisions made by industry players to drive profits and stay a step ahead of the competition. Shorter discussions of Internet-based software platforms provide an important glimpse into a future in which the way we buy, pay, watch, listen, learn, and communicate will change forever. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.