Harnessing Information Management, the Data and Infrastructure
CIS 500: Information Systems for Decision-Making

Amazon’s success can be considered to be based on its’ ability of its’ Information
Systems (IS) and Architecture to capture, analysis and manage information about its’ customers.
Many organizations have the capability to do the same but without the same success, so why the difference? In a 2004 interview with Business Week’s, Robert D. Hof, Jeff Bezos stated, “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better”.
It appears the secret lies within the aforementioned quote, by the words “guests” and
“hosts”. Jeff views the commerce interaction as a relationship. Being a good “host” and making the customer (guest) experience better requires understanding of what the customer wants to obtain from their experience (relationship) with Amazon. The relationship importance is prioritized in Amazon’s mission statement, “Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company".
To build this relationship requires understanding the customer increasingly better, which in turn requires Amazon to make frequent attempts to engage the customer, through maintaining a high exposure on various “touch-points” across the Web, through search engines, vendor/partner websites, and social media all geared to steer new customers to Amazon’s primary website. For established customers, Amazon’s 24/7 customer service and support, email follow-up of transactions and predictive suggestions of potential items of customer interest based on purchase and browsing history are strengths used to build a long-term relationship. All these contacts, likes, dislikes, shares, etc., all help build more than just managed information about the customer, instead, Amazon builds a