The global environment or the global business drivers are mainly separated into two groups, general culture factors and specific business factors. The general cultural factors such as global communication and transportation technologies, which are necessary because most international companies aren’t centralized. The different departments of a company are broken down and dispersed among different countries for instance the marketing, accounting, and management may all be based in the United States while production is based in Mexico and distribution is based in many different countries. This calls for an integrated system that can communicate easily with all the different branches/departments of the company. Fo

The next step is the global strategies and business organization. A corporation must choose a strategy, organize the business to that strategy, and organize the systems management area to seek a global position in the marketplace. There are four main global strategies a corporation can adopt: domestic exporter, multinational, franchiser, or transitional. A domestic exporter is characterized by its heavy centralization of corporate activities in its home country. Production, finance, marketing, sales, and accounting are all based in the company’s home country and then the international sales is then dispersed using subsidiaries or international contractors. The multinational strategy take financial and control from a home base but set production, sales, and marketing to overseas units spread throughout the companies consumer base. This is seen a lot in the automotive industry where the company is run from a central location but all the manufacturing and sales facilities are all over the world where there is demand for automobiles. Franchisers are kind of both of the above. The business starts off centralizing production, sales, marketing, and financing in one location but then is handed or decentralized to foreign personnel for further distribution, sale, and production of goods overseas. This is mainly adopted in the food industry, because food is perishable and has a very short time span of use when good, it must be done all over the world in the society/economy where it will be consumed. The industry cannot just produce the goods in a centralized location and then distribute to the rest of the off site sales offices because the goods will go bad before they can be purchased. Finally a transitional strategy is that of a company that knows no national borders. These companies use the entire world as their management core and not just one centralized office. Now don’t get me wrong there is a centralized headquarters but the decision making is handed out to the individual offices around the world to better allow the people or management on site to make more educated and socially biased decisions to better benefit the company.

As businesses and firms move toward international sales and business done abroad more and more technological alternatives are becoming available. The main issues with hardware and telecommunications systems are integration and connectivity. Integration of existing systems that need to be tied into one system that works hand in hand with the other systems linked to it can be a challenge. As discussed in the paragraph before there are new companies emerging with these integration technologies such as Oracle. Oracle is one company that sells a package of different hardware and telecommunication devices and information that can be used worldwide. The products can be adapted to function anywhere in the world and be easily understood by the operator no matter what their background, ethnicity, race, or religion. Going with one of the systems that these companies offer is best for an international firm seeing as developing one’s own system can be extremely difficult and costly. Now if a firm is trying to merge with another firm overseas and become one international firm where two different systems are in use, there are packages available to attempt to unite these to different systems and run them as one. This is usually done via the Internet by creating a virtual private network over the Internet that has translation capabilities, storage capabilities, and conversion factors figured in. One last alternative would be for a firm to create its own intranet or extranet. They are basically information sites accessible by the Internet and they are secured with security software. The firm r

Some topics in this essay:
, Oracle Oracle, social norms, easily understood, business processes, international sales, global strategies, production sales marketing, core business processes, specific business factors, department company, international company, production sales, specific business, leased lines,