Question 1

There are several generic business-level competitive strategies that can be applied to nearly every type of business.

Identify the business-level strategy that you think best fits the MySQL case, give a brief definition of the strategy in your own words, and provide 2 examples that support your choice of strategy. Explain why these examples fit with the strategy you identified.

A complete answer includes one definition of a business-level strategy and two supporting examples from the case with explanations.

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Question 2

The combination of an objective/goal and evaluation criterion creates the basis for a control. Identify 3 examples of controls, specifying the objectives/goals that could have been used to ensure appropriate disaster preparedness for the College of Business Administration's Office of IT in the Up In Smoke case and how it would be evaluated to create controls ensure that the objective/goal was met to support proper preparedness.

Be creative: you will not find these controls explicitly listed in the case, but the case suggests appropriate controls that could have been used. Each control combining objective/goal and evaluation criterion should be distinct from the others, but there may be multiple criteria used to evaluate a single objective, or multiple objectives that can be evaluated by a single criterion.

For each control, specify:

1. what type of control it would be (precontrol/feedforward, concurrent, postaction/feedback) and why,
2. whether it relies on IS/IT (not all controls require or involve IS/IT), and
3. if so, how IS/IT provides support for the control.

A complete answer includes three controls described with both objective/goal and evaluation criterion, and for each of the three controls, the type of control and role of IS/IT in it.

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Question 3

Describe how MySQLs corporate strategies took advantage of the historical/technological, sociocultural, economic/environmental, and/or political/legal circumstances to produce their unique outcomes. Give three specific examples from the case to illustrate your position. Note that this is a variation on a PESTEL analysis!

A complete answer includes a description of how strategies and circumstances interacted, and three examples.

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