Learning from the Leaders: Amazon’s IT Efforts that Inspire your Business
From a bookseller to a leading technology provider – the journey of Amazon.com Inc. over the past two decades has surely been a momentous one. Ever since it went live in 1995, Amazon has redefined how people could use the Web. However, all this couldn’t have been a reality in the absence of robust IT support and significant efforts in the direction of leading a change bigger than what the world had seen back then. From e-readers to online grocery shopping, video streaming service, and much more – Amazon has introduced technological advancement on many fronts. Inspiring businesses worldwide, this Seattle-based company has a strong customer base all over the world. And the success story of Amazon has many key learnings for the businesses of today. Let’s take a quick look at some of the Amazon’s IT efforts that continue to shape the world and continue to inspire modern-day businesses: Amazon drives innovation. A tech innovator in every sense, Amazon drives innovation. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at Recode’s Code Conference in 2016 that Amazon has the “gold standard culture for innovation and pioneering work.” With a culture for innovation focused on improving customer experience, driving operational effectiveness and developing new business models, Amazon has succeeded remarkably in a variety of product categories. By focusing on what the customers really want and what they will be willing to pay for, the company has led innovation far and wide. Not being afraid of new ideas, the company introduces novelty with sophistication, whether it is robotics or speed fulfillment. And being involved in too many things isn’t a challenge here. The company is making headways in a variety of realms, including cloud computing, natural language processing, retail, devices and a lot more. It is not afraid of failure. If there is one thing that Amazon isn’t afraid of, then it has to be failure. Several projects started by the company have failed over the course of the past two decades, but nothing has stopped it to reinvent, move on and succeed after failures. The risk-taking ability and the desire to make the most of the world of IT even led to the discovery of Amazon Web Services. Even Bezos isn’t hesitant to admit that the growth achieved by Amazon is due to the failures that it has faced. To quote him, “If you’re going to take bold bets, they’re going to be experiments, and if they’re experiments, you don’t know ahead of time if they’re going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.” It embraces external trends. In an era where many technology giants have become obsolete because of their reluctance to change, Amazon has been different. The company very well realized the power that external trends hold and is confidently moving in the direction of latest IT developments. In a 2017 annual letter to the company’s shareholders, Bezos wrote about “embracing external trends”. The company is training its workforce to become proficient at AI. From running courses on machine-learning to hosting talks from in-house experts, Amazon understands that cultivating the rapidly evolving machine-learning culture is the need of the hour. And the company’s revolutionary smart speaker, the Echo, and its voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant service, Alexa are a demonstration of the IT efforts of the company, even when it did not have the artificial intelligence prowess needed to achieve what it did.
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