Management Information Systems report for Walmart

Assignment Brief

Assignment Brief

As part of the formal assessment for the programme you are required to submit a Management Information Systems report. Please refer to your Student Handbook for full details of the programme assessment scheme and general information on preparing and submitting assignments.

1. Demonstrate an understanding of information needs within different functional areas of organisations.

2. Identify and compare information systems within different functional areas of organisations.

3. Use information systems to produce management information at middle and senior management levels of organisations.

4. Identify and examine the legal implications associated with information handling and security.

5. Identify and examine the ethical implications associated with information handling and security.

Please note that exceeding the word count by over 10% will result in a reduction in grade by the same percentage that the word count is exceeded.

You must not include your name in your submission because Arden University operates anonymous marking, which means that markers should not be aware of the identity of the student. However, please do not forget to include your STU number.

You have been engaged as a MIS consultant for the following organisation. Walmart is the largest retail company in the United States . Currently Walmart operates over 4,700 retail facilities globally (Walmart Inc., 2020) with revenues of more than 510 Billlion U.S. Dollars (according to the Fortune 500 index). Recently, Amazon implemented a new innovative strategy called ‘Amazon Go’ convenient stores, where customers can simply pick up items and walk out of the store without checking on a cashier. In the same vein, Walmart is currently looking for counter-strategies in order to increase their e-commerce shares.

For the specified focal organisation (Walmart), you should contact your own research in order to provide a report to the board of directors, which will answer the following:

Describe how the different business units of Walmart are interconnected. In your analysis, you should provide an organisation chart and data flow diagrams to represent the dependence of each of the business units to each other and the direction of data flows within the organisation and provide the reasons behind this structure.

Describe the different forms of data and the role of data warehousing in Walmart. In your analysis, you should evaluate the current Information Systems and provide recommendations to the board of directors about big data solutions. In order to fully answer the question, a detailed description of the proposed solution is needed providing the advantages and disadvantages of the system in response to Amazon’s strategy.

By taking into account information from the latest programme of Walmart (ethics and compliance) and the new GDPR data protection legislation, provide a summary of your key concerns about ethical, legal and professional implications associated with information handling and security.

Fortune. (2020). Walmart. [online] Available at:

https://fortune.com/fortune500/2019/walmart/ [Accessed 1 April 2020].

Walmart Inc. (2020). Unites States Securities and Exchange Commission form 10-K. Retrieved from Securities and Exchange Commission website: http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000104169/af5415d9-0e07-4ba1-a6cc-bb3058a7f4e8.pdf