Amazon: Three Home Automation Case Studies (e-book)

Digital Business Case Studies and Solutions by Gregory John Lee and Vernon Timothy Thaver is a remarkable compendium of case studies in the domain of digital business and digitalization, as well as a varied collection of challenges to the readers and reflections by the authors on those challenges.

In this set of cases, we discuss three Amazon initiatives to dominate the home automation market, namely the combination of Amazon Echo and Alexa, Amazon Ring, and Amazon Dash. Each case illustrates different elements of the broader home automation area, including pitfalls and failures in IoT, which is a persistent and crucial risk in such projects.

The challenges focus on fairly fundamental IOT concepts including:

• Understanding what fundamentally makes up an IoT system (through Ring – reflection contained in the Instructor’s Supplement available only to instructors)
• Understanding common causes of IoT failure (through Dash – reflection included in this document)
• Reflecting on regulation of IoT (with Alexa and Ring as contentious examples – reflection left to the reader)

Primary area: Technology in business (internet of things)
Other areas: Cybersecurity, digital ethics.

# of pages: 18 (Case 10.5 pages, Challenges & reflections 3 pages, rest of case is references & appendices)