Ebay: An Information Management Analysis

From 1995 to 2008, eBay was seen as a retail pioneer. But as of late, the company has turned into an auction wasteland with outdated technology. Its competitors like Amazon.com began beating it at its own game by offering best price inventories to customers. "In eBay's scaling and success it stopped innovating." New CEO John Donahue has been entrusted with realigning the business and IT functions within the organization to bring eBay back to the forefront in retail sales and the emerging cross-channel retailing market.

In 1995, eBay began as AuctionWeb in san Jose, California as a means for founder Pierre Omidyar to sell is broken laser pointer. Surprised that it sold for a little over $14 he contacted the buyer and asked did he realize that the laser pointer was broken. The buyer replied that he was a collector of broken laser pointers. After which time, the growth of eBay was phenomenal. In 1997, the site hosted 2 million auctions and 341,000 users. By 1998, the company hired Meg Whitman as CEO. At which time they had 30 employees, half a million users and approximately $4 million dollars in revenues in the United States. With all this growth, the company's website was seen by some as simple in design yet confusing to navigate and make purchases. The eBay mission-vision statement is to provide a platform globally where practically anyone can trade practically anything. In order to support this, Whitman had to be the champion within the company. As stated in the class text, she had to have a compelling vision of the state of affairs within the organization, credibility and reputation, and communicate the vision throughout all levels of the organization. Early in her time at eBay, Whitman had to align the business and IT organizations in order to achieve and maintain the competitive advantage. During this time, she organized the company into various business organizations each one with its own executive team. The leads for each executive team would then meet with Whitman regularly to go over goals and objectives. In analysis, the author believes that this was a strength and a key factor in the early success in eBay's rise to greatness in retailing. Some events that occurred under Whitman's leadership that contributed to eBay's success are as follows:

* Started the eBay Foundation

* International website expansions(UK, Germany, and Australia)

* eBay Motors launched

* Made application interfaces public to developers

These events helped to increase loyalty to the company and stimulated development of technology for the organization. When Whitman took the helm, eBay grew to hundreds of millions of registered users, over 15,000 employees and revenue of approximately $7 billion. During her tenure at eBay, Meg Whitman did well early on aligning the business and IT functions within the company, but while revenue is high,