Information Assets

Technology and Decision Making

Lucas Moore, ArtShirts’s creative director, was responsible for model selection, photo shoot coordination, creative licensing, talent licensing, and overseeing the creative-asset production tasks of the ArtShirts and Amazon Web sites. As a creative director, Lucas was also responsible for insuring that all creative assets, including the company logo, met ArtShirts’s branding and visual criteria, and that each asset was legally and technically prepared for usage through the company’s various marketing and promotional channels. Although Lucas had shared his “brand bible,” a brand style guide, and vigorously used Basecamp to post creative compositions for approval across the company, his approvals came in slowly and not in any particular divisional order. Occasionally, it would happen that John reviewed a product image after it had gone live on the Web site and hated the model wearing it; a certain shirt wasn’t selling and Walter wanted the copy changed immediately; Laura’s marketing partners wanted a special asset that was customized to their Web site palette and not ArtShirts’s approved palette; or Cynthia felt that the product description was misleading on a promotional asset. As a result, Lucas often found himself modifying his creative assets several times or even hosting emergency model calls and photo shoots to accommodate last-minute changes and approvals. Lucas found that his current software for gathering approvals did not allow him the ability to forward assets through a hierarchical chain which would give him the assurance that reviews and approvals were being blessed and guided by the appropriate order of decision-makers in the company.

Information assets are crucial to the functioning of any business, and some are more important than others. Review the weekly readings and do the following:

Identify the most valuable and reused “information” ArtShirts might possess: copyrights, logos, the company handbook, employee knowledge and skills, or processes. Justify your answers with appropriate reasons.
Write your initial response in 2–3 paragraphs. Apply APA standards to citation of sources.

Please use the CASE study and the book:

Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. P. (2017). Management information systems: managing the digital firm. Pearson.