Critical evaluation of the organization

As the Chinese economy transforms into a consumption-driven economy, Alibaba has a huge opportunity to understand consumers’ changing needs. We help connect the whole world with China to facilitate easy trading and access to the world’s largest consumer
market.
An interview with Ali Baba’s CEO and Group Chairman Daniel Zhang, McKinsey Quarterly September 12th 2019
Introduction
Since its outset, the group managed to create an ecosystem. As Jack Ma said the idea was to give birth to an open, coordinated, and prosperous online ecosystem. It would initially link buyers and sellers together but then it went on to include businesses like advertising, marketing, logistics and finance. To put it in a nutshell, Alibaba combines businesses like Amazon, Facebook and Google under one roof, a feature which makes it unique and quite powerful. Campbell, H. (2018)
The ecosystem Alibaba has managed to put together is called ‘smart business’ as it combines online technology with machine learning capabilities. Alibaba is not only at the forefront of ecommerce and
The ecommerce giant founded two decades ago is now heralded as one of the biggest competitors of Amazon.com worldwide with a sheer business size which is mindboggling. During the year ending June 30, 2020 the group has managed to climb to 742 million active clients through a wide diversified portfolio of products and services which includes advertising, retailing, financial services along with online selling. Two years ago the Nov. 11 sale commanded 30 billion dollars in sales in just 24 hours. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/china/speak-softly-make-tough-decisions-an-interview- with-alibaba-group-chairman accessed November 1st 2020

ebusiness but it is also able to depoy AI capabilities which make the current CEO Daniel Zhang speak of AI as the very acronym of the group (Alibaba) he leads. Campbell, H. (2018)
Objective of this Assessment:
The objective of this assessment is to test the degree to which you have mastered the Learning Objectives for this module:
To enhance students’ knowledge of concepts, frameworks and techniques employed in analysing and designing the modern organizations.
To understand how firms adapt to the external environment and coordinate the activities of different groups inside the firm to help enhance a given firm’s competitive advantage.
To examine concepts and constructs such as the organizational learning, population ecology, formal vs. Informal organization to build a higher understanding of the new organization forms and theories.
This assignment seeks to assess your understanding of these issues, and others covered over the term, your ability to apply models and theories in a business context and your ability to critically evaluate the performance of your chosen company in relation to these issues.
The key to success in this assessment is to use critical reflective skills to research, analyse and evaluate the theories and issues. You must support the paper with specific academic text and journal references in the critical discussion.
Assignment description:
This is an individual assignment.
This is an individual project of 3000 words +/- 10%. Your task: critically describe and evaluate Ali Baba’s current organizational structure and overall business configuration and then suggest a suitable adaptation to improve its performance. The adaptation might be to flatten it, make it more customer focused, nimble, networked, cost efficient, or any combination of these or another significant performance improvement that you identify.
Assignment guidelines: You should include the following headings in your assignment:
REPORT:
i) Critical evaluation of the organization-s current status; ii) Critiqueofcurrentrestructuringplanandoptions
PROJECT:
iii) Action & control plan
Issues which are dealt with in each section do not intend to exclude others you may consider relevant as well.
REPORT:
2

i) Critical evaluation of the organization’s current status (30 points)
Issues that may be covered include (though not exclusively):
• Analyze the Ali Baba’s main business line by profits and revenues along with the various business models the Corporation has pursued in the various market segments during the past five years both in China and Worldwide.
• Identify which environmental factors (Use Raskino and Gartner Group’s model) may have influenced the company’s Business strategy (use Porter’s generic strategy framework) and the type of control strategy the organisation has chosen (bureaucratic, market and clan). Explain how the concept of Smart business applies to the Alibaba group.
• Indicate three major business policies the company currently uses to guarantee that Ali Baba will effectively meet its growth objectives. Comment on how the organisation structure, culture and processes have evolved in recent years to support such policies up to the pre-COVID era.
ii) Critique of current reorganization plan and options (30 points):
The restructuring plan post-COVID should set out :
• Main strategic objectives sought.
• Any concomitant changes to the organisation’s strategic vision, business
philosophy, use of technology and alliances.
• Improvements needed to the existing organisation and the nature of the
program – cost reduction, operational improvement, service improvement and
any related changes to management style and skills.
• Whether to drop (divest) any current SBUs, which ones to develop further, and
which new ones to start.
• Type of control strategy the organisation will use (bureaucratic, market and
clan) PROJECT:
iii) The Action & Control Plan In this part formulate actions to concretise the restructuring (30 points):
• A milestone action plan indicating who will be responsible (Strategic Business Unit, Division) for the respective actions to be undertaken in the implementation of the restructuring plan, and when these actions will be undertaken.
• An overall framework to monitor and control (measure) that the restructuring plan is being implemented to required time, quality and cost standards and its goals achieved.
Conclusion: Summary and explanation of findings and methodology (10 points)
3

Wikipedia is not allowed and plagiarism 100% free. Structure of the assignment:
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Introduction: including brief introduction to the company (not included in the word count). ·
Body of the paper:
REPORT:
1. Critical evaluation of the organization-s current status 2. Critique of current restructuring plan and options
PROJECT:
3. The action & control plan
Recommendations
Bibliography and citations
NOTE: The cover page should include the name of the course, the title of the project, the student’s full name, the tutor’s name and the date. The table of contents should include all the headings with appropriate page numbers, including the Bibliography and the Appendices.
Format of the assignment:
• The assignment should be prepared as a neatly typed Word document (Times New Roman 12, or Arial 10 points), with double spacing and page numbering.
• The assignment is expected to be approximately 3,000 words in length +/-10% (not counting tables or inserts, introduction and conclusions).
• All sources must be referenced in the text and a full bibliography must be provided (including visited websites) in the Harvard style.
• All work must conform to University regulations on Cheating, Collusion and Plagiarism’ as described in your program handbook.
• Students are reminded that depth, relevance and variety are the crucial elements of quality research. (Wikipedia is not considered to be a relevant source of information, any students referencing Wikipedia will be deducted marks! Alternatively, if you find information on Wikipedia use the original sources listed at the bottom of the article