Vera Selection (VS) is a unisex luxury fashion brand established by Vera Lee in 2000. Over the years, the brand has experienced significant growth and now operates its retail stores in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Perth. VS employs 135 permanent staff. Their 2021 revenue was recorded at around $45 millions. VS expanded its online presence in 2010 by adding an eCommerce site. Today VS ships its merchandise to over 80 countries. The success of the brand is attributed to its strong customer focus and quality timeless items they stock. However, due to limited changes in its strategy, the company has started to lose its competitive advantage and market share. There was a concern that the brand started to lose younger customers. Further, due to the global uncertainty caused by COVID-19, VS's revenue growth rates have been steadily decreasing and are below the market average. Therefore, the situation has reached the point where change is urgently needed to recover and get the company back to a leading position in the post-pandemic environment. After careful consideration, the board of directors decided to explore digital technologies to meet their business goals, such as to improve organisational performance or create other business values. Sarah Tran, Chief Digital Officer (CDO), and her Information Technology department are responsible for identifying challenges and exploring opportunities to achieve the business goals through Digital and AI technologies. The data analytics team reviewed VS's existing business databases and systems, e.g., customer, transaction and product databases, and eCommerce shopping and social media sites (customer reviews). VS Australia has a data warehouse with business intelligence models and dashboards to generate regular as well as ad-hoc analytical reports and insight into their operations, sales, customers and finance performance. Sarah Tran plans to explore opportunities to use Artificial Intelligence (for example Machine Learning, sentiment analysis and Natural Language Processing). Several ideas were considered, such as customer service process automation, product recommendation system, and supply chain optimisation. Specifically, they discussed about a new shopping app with AI capabilities to recommend outfit ideas and enable users to search for VS products by photo. Sarah Tran presented the ideas at a recent board meeting. Martin Andersen, the CEO, asked for a clear articulation of the value proposition of Digital/AI technologies. Further, he was interested in knowing specifically to which business processes (marketing, sale and post-sale) Digital/AI should apply at VS and how it can be 'assimilated' into the VS processes. Overall, Sarah Tran was asked to develop an AI/Digital Technology plan for Vera Selection

Task Description

This assignment is based on the case study of Vera Selection and the management intention to explore in Digital/AI technologies to meet their business goals, such as to improve organisational performance and/or create other business values. Your task is to develop a business technology proposal to add strategic and operational values to Vera Selection fashion company.

Specific Requirements

At this stage, you are required to undertake the following activities: Brainstorm and develop a mindmap of the problem space to explore the problem space using the BA core concepts, e.g. to map (1) Vera Selection (overall) products/services, related stakeholders and identify current problem areas; (2) how the company is using current technologies; and (3) how new Digital/AI technologies can be used, and why. This is scheduled to be conducted in Week 1. Conduct a situation analysis (SWOT and strategy) to examine Vera Selection (overall) situation in terms of S, W, O, and T, as well as proposing two alternative technology strategies. You are required to justify how your proposed technology strategies can improve the alignment between internal elements and external elements identified in the SWOT analysis and make and justify recommendations. This is scheduled to be conducted in Week 2. Vera Selection executive managers (Martin Andersen and Sarah Tran) have decided to move forward with the proposed AI app to suggest outfit ideas and find VS products by photo. You are to conduct a stakeholder analysis to identify relevant stakeholders, [Type here] [Type here] [Type here] page 2 examine their needs, risks, and levels of influence vs importance in relation to the proposal, and suggest a stakeholder management plan. This is scheduled to be conducted in Week 3. Need an executive summary based on the findings from the above activities