5.3.1 Factors that can trigger change

• When a company decides to change it is rarely ever an action made with certainty and is always risky. AN example is the windows phone that was an un-guaranteed attempt to break into the phone market.
• There are 2 main types of factors that can cause change for a business, they are?


  Planned

  Unforeseen/inevitable
• An unforeseen factor is when something unexpected happens which causes a business to have to adapt quickly. For instance, if there were a sudden increase in demand for a product then the business may need to hire more staff to meet this demand.
• A planned factor is when a business chooses to make a change because they want to improve their performance or gain a competitive advantage over other businesses. An example would be Apple releasing new products every year to keep up with competitors like Samsung.
• The external environment refers to all the things outside of the control of the business such as government policies, economic conditions, social trends etc. These changes will affect how the business operates and what decisions it makes.
• 5 examples of planned for factors and simplified explanation of each:

  Adding additional features/services - To be more competetive and make people want to buy more stuff

  Diversification - Expands it's services into new markets, often with new products and services

  Scaling - Company increases capacity to serve more people

  Rebranding - Company changes its image to freshen reputation

  Adopting new technologies - As new tech comes out businesses may wish to use it to make more money
• 4 examples of unforseen or unpreventable factors:

  Crisis - Sudden expected event such as war

  Zero-day vulnerabilities - security flaw unknown to developer until release

  Data corruption - Data is attacked, or otherwise damaged/lost

  System failures - Unexpected outages, due to software or hardware
• Most change that result from unforseen or unpreventable factors is stuff to reduce the likelihood of it happening again such as better data recover policy and protection in the result of data corruption