Strategic Analysis and Selection of Information Systems Essay

Strategic Analysis and Selection of Information Systems - Essay Example For the purpose of this assignment, two articles will be reviewed for inclusion into the essay. The first is Collaborative Computing and True Enterprise Architecture is Still Two Years Away, by Worthen and the second is B2B: Execution of the Concept is Key to Success by M. Sawhney. The purpose of this assignment is to explain the relationship between business strategy in IT strategy, determine any problems that occurred with strategy formulation, determine if there were problems with strategy implementation, and determine if there were problems with the strategic process. In order to fully understand the concepts presented in this assignment, it is first essential to know the definition of the words that will be discussed herein. Strategy can be defined as "a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often "winning". Strategy is differentiated from tactics or immediate actions with resources at hand by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed. Strategies are used to make the problem or problems easier to understand and solve" (Wikipedia, 2008). Strategy formulation then can be defined as "the process of determining appropriate courses of action for achieving organizational objectives and thereby accomplishing organizational purpose" (Kotelnikov, 2008). Strategic processes are made up of macro processes within an organization. "All organizational work is part of one or more processes. At their very broadest, macro processes can span an entire organization and cut across all major function s or departments. Examples of macro processes include the design and development of new products/services; producing products or delivering services; product order or service request fulfillment; invoicing/accounting, and collecting money; inventory management and logistics; information management; admitting, discharging, and transferring patients; or generating leads and making sales" (Clemmer 2008). Article 1 B2B: Execution of the Concept is Key to Success, by Mohanbir Sawhney Problems with Strategy Formulation When forming their strategy, "Their logic seemed elegant: create marketplaces that would match buyers and sellers, bringing improved liquidity, efficiency and transparency to B2B transactions, and make money through transaction fees from the trades, Once the buyers and sellers were on board to conduct transactions, the exchanges could augment that core functionality with value-added services such as logistics management, credit and settlement, and supplier verification" (Sawhney, 2002, p. 1). Yet, the B2B boom that was supposed to happen did not. This happened when investors started to question the business model upon with the new B2B concept was based. In other words, it was not the strategy formulation that was the problem; it was the strategy implementation. Problems with Strategy Implementation The article says itself, "One might conclude from the evidence that the idea of a B2B exchange is fundamentally flawed. However, it's not the concept of the exchange that is flawed but the execution of that concept" (Sawhney, 2002, p. 1). The article cites the chicken-and-the-egg concept as the reason for the failure of the B2B concept; i.e. it is hard to get buyers without suppliers and it is hard to get

Key Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issues Research Paper

Key Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issues - Research Paper Example This paper presents an overview of ethical concerns that are caused by the information technology. The information technology brings about a number of ethical, social, and political issues. Additionally, ethical issues consist of both political and social issues. For instance, at present, customer service has turned out to be one of the most important organizational tasks or services which engender a large number of ethical challenges and issues. In many cases, the lack of education and training in the subject of internet use has made a large number of individuals to take part in activities that question their ethics. This paper will present an overview of key technology trends that raise various ethical issues. Basically, ethics is a set of rules and principles that tell the individual whether they are wrong or right, acting as free of charge ethical agents, from which people draw guidance while making decisions to direct their actions and behaviors. Without a doubt, the information technology (IT) has brought wonderful advantages and opportunities to business organizations as well as individuals. It has modernized and revolutionized all the fields of life. However, at the same time it has caused a wide variety of ethical issues for individuals, business organizations and cultures for the reason that they open new horizons for strong societal change, and as a result intimidate offered distributions of authority, capital, privileges, and responsibilities. In addition, similar to any other technologies, for instance, electricity, steam engines, the telephone, fax machine and the radio, information technology can be utilized to accomplish social development; on the other hand, it can also be used by the bad people to carry out illegal activities. For instance, they can use it to threaten cherished social values and commit crimes. In this scenario, the advancements in information technology will create advantages and opportunities for a large number of businesses and individuals as well as expenses for others. In addition, information technology has given a great deal more pressure to ethical issues through the developments in the Internet, electronic commerce (e-Commerce) and electronic business (e-Business). It is an admitted fact that the Internet and other similar digital technologies make it easier for the bad people to bring together, integrate, and dispense their criminal activities. Some of the cases that can cause various ethical issues and concerns can include misuse of data and information, giving a free rein to new concerns regarding the suitable utilization of customers’ information, the security of individual privacy, and the protection of intellectual property and rights. Sometimes, the staff members of an organization having extraordinary skills and knowledge can deceive IT resources and business systems by using fake information and records and redirecting money at a level unbelievable in the pre-computer age. Some of the other well-known and vital ethical concerns caused by the increasing use of information technology comprise setting up responsibility for the costs of information technology and business management systems, establishing standards and measures to ensure the security of systems’ quality that ensures the security and privacy of society and individuals, and maintaining values and foundations believed to be critical to the quality of life in an information culture.

Buying School Clunkers Make More Sense than a Brand New Car Essay

Buying School Clunkers Make More Sense than a Brand New Car - Essay Example Clunkers may look like they should be retired because they need somebody work or does not have the latest bells and whistles but with proper maintenance, it gets the kid from point A to point B. That is all that should matter to them at their ages. † That is sound advice coming from a man who makes his living selling cars. A new car will the owners back by at least $20,000 while a clunker can easily be had for around $2,000 and up, there truly does seem to be an economic advantage to owning a clunker. Provided the new owner of the car will not mind shelling out some extra dollars for whatever repairs the car might need. He still comes out ahead in the long run than if he had bought a new car. While most teenage kids of driving age look forward to waking up to a brand new car being delivered to their doorstep on the morning of their birthday, the economics of our times have changed that pattern. Since a brand new car loses approximately 20 percent of its value the minute it is d riven off the car lot, buying your teenage kid a â€Å"teaching car† which is what some parents and mechanics prefer to call the clunkers, turns out to be a big bargain. Buying a car that is more than ten years old often is often seen as a waste of money because of the cost of repairs that are involved in whipping the car into shape. Wise buyers though know that is not the case. In fact, the old clunkers can help you save money in the long run even with the cost of repairs thrown in.  ... He still comes out ahead in the long run than if he had bought a new car. While most teenage kids of driving age look forward to waking up to a brand new car being delivered at their doorstep on the morning of their birthday, the economics of our times have changed that pattern. Since a brand new car loses approximately 20 percent of its value the minute it is driven off the car lot, buying you teenage kid a â€Å"teaching car† which is what some parents and mechanics prefer to call the clunkers, turns out to be a big bargain. Buying a car that is more than ten years old often is often seen as a waste of money because of the cost of repairs that are involved in whipping the car into shape. Wise buyers though know that is not the case. In fact, the old clunkers can help you save money in the long run even with the cost of repairs thrown in. People like Joel Berry (Why I Drive a 13-Year-Old Car, 2009) understand that economics plays an important role in car buying decisions. In his case, he has been driving the same second hand 1995 Geo Prizm for a number of years now and far as he is concerned, the car is far from being the old clunker that his friends think his car to be. Joel explains; â€Å"I bought my Geo Prizm in 1995 with 5,000 miles on it. It now has 140,000 miles on it and still runs fine. I paid off the car in 1999. It is now 2008.I haven’t had a car payment in nine years. How much has this saved? Our payments for this car were $250 a month. Over nine years, I’ve gone 108 months without making a payment. At $250 a month, that’s a savings of $27,000. Over the lifetime of the car, I’ve spent less than $2000 in repairs. Subtracting this from my savings still leaves me with $25,000 extra over buying a new car right

Module 4 BHM415 (AUG2014-1) (CASE)Consumer Driven Health Care (SLP) Essay

Module 4 BHM415 (AUG2014-1) (CASE)Consumer Driven Health Care (SLP) - Essay Example Moreover, CDHC create an awareness of health care to consumers. With this awareness, consumers are able to weigh prices from different providers and select medical service that best suits them financially and as a result, service providers will re-price and re-package their services, in competition of patients, determined by quality and price and in the long-run the services become quality and affordable (Catherine, 2010). Furthermore, the American patients are able to utilize the internet in browsing the medical journals freely as well as the libraries for information that was not previously available to them. The parents can comfortably test their children for any ear infection while at home. This is made easy since the parents can make use of the over the counters do it yourself diagnostic kits and this assists is saving the parents from unnecessary trips to the healthcare providers. CDHC offer several services like health savings accounts (HSAs) and health reimbursement agreements (HRAs) where in each account; there is a function for deposit, accumulation, and withdrawal of payments. With health savings accounts (HSAs), the contribution deposited into the account is tax-advantaged and various medical costs are covered by the account thus cutting down on consumers healthcare cost. On the other hand, health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) are employer-sponsored and allow employees accumulate funds to cover their health care expenses. These expenses are employer-funded and the employer define how much to set aside for each employee, based on how much he can afford (Hughes, Root, & Roehrig, 2007). Nearly half (45 %) of the population in the U.S are estimated to have been infected with some type of chronic condition. Using the CDHC systems, these patients who are infected with the chronic infections can control their healthcare as well as manage their conditions e asily something that was not possible in

AN ESSAY BASED ON THE BELOW CASE STUYDY Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

AN BASED ON THE BELOW CASE STUYDY - Essay Example It is very unethical, for the Tomoco Company to offer pay Vijay money so that he can offer them the very important and confidential information of Ishimuru, this will highly dent and even kill the trust company's customer have in the company in this era where corporate ethics has become very important in aspect of any company operations and marketing and brand image. The Tomoco company is dedicated to coming up with new innovations in the auto mobile sector. It has the responsibility to ensure that it come up with its own battery formula that can be used in the proposed econocar. Probably Tomoco has a compliance program that is well established which shows that Tomoco has been committed to laws and regulations governing the country auto mobile is designing, marketing and selling activities. Thus getting information falsely from a rival company will be going against these laws or regulation and the company may destroy its image that it has built over the years. It is worth to note that a good company image and reputation goes a long way in marketing a company products, in this case Tomoco cars and any improper business conduct of the company may lead to destroying the reputation and tradition of the company and thus reducing its market segment. (Dole and Lowe, 2003) The Tomoco company also may face legal actions fro... Since the law is applied when a person has leaked important and confidential information regarding a company which is vital to its business operation, to a competitor company, thus hampering fair competition, Ishimuru company will have a strong case as it will have evidence and more so it will be able to identify the person (Vijay) and the company (Tomoco) which has obtained the leaked or stolen information. Such lawsuits are normal costly to a company and even if Ishimuru losses the case the damage will be already be caused to Tomoco which may be irreparable. (Dole and Lowe, 2003) Since both the two companies are involved in research and innovation of lithium ion (li-ion) battery, and no particular company has a proven formula or an already working design, it is equally risky and nave to accept a design from a rival. This is because the proposed design may not be good enough than the one the Tomoco is developing. More so Vijay seems to be a self centred person and may easily sell a wrong formula to Tomoco are equally will also be willing to sell the same design plan to any other company after sealing a deal with Tomoco. Basing on the above factors, Clive smith on behave of Tomoco will probably refuse the offer from Sandeep on the basis of ethical conduct and keeping the company reputation, image and lawful conduct. (Dole and Lowe, 2003) Draft marketing plan for the launch of the econocar A Product Marketing Manager is to make sure that company's product achieves the returns expectations that the manager projected when he received the endorsement for developing the product. The method of ensuring that products achieve revenue is by including a launch plan. This contains all the deliverables (collateral, materials for

Analize a social problem in the community in which I live Essay

Analize a social problem in the community in which I live - Essay Example The mental health professionals hold important positions in implementation and strategizing such an intervention, and one such project has been presented here that can be implemented. Following implementation, this proposal incorporates an idea to evaluate to see how far it has been able to achieve success in reducing bullying or implementing the social change in the community. "But it did not end there. As soon as Amanda got home, the instant messages started popping up on her computer screen. She was a tattletale and a liar, they said. Shaken, she typed back, "You stole my stuff!" She was a "stuck-up bitch," came the instant response in the box on the screen, followed by a series of increasingly ugly epithets." This is the story of Amanda, writes Harmon (2004) in her New York Times article, "Internet Gives Teenage Bullies Weapons to Wound From Afar" published on August 26, 2004. This is a consequence of a fight that started at school, when Amanda Marcuson dared to report the makeup in her pencil case stolen in the school by some eighth-grade classmates (Harmon, 2004). Amanda, however, said the girls never said a word to her in person, and she thought, "It seems like people can say a lot worse things to someone online than when theyre actually talking to them," (Harmon, 2004) but, these messages went to the full capacity of her cell phone mailbox. This is the picture of the county where this author lives, Westchester County in NY State, USA. It seems bullying is no longer an evidence of cruelty that is confined to schools; the quarrels can be pursued and amplified even from a distance into homes in a more devious manner. Most likely bullying is inbred in schools for perhaps as long as schools have existed. Recently, systematic investigation has confirmed to be a pervasive phenomenon. However, in her discussion, Arehart-Treichel (2004) comments that parents and teachers have become more determined to have actions taken

Research Papers in Computer Science Essay Example for Free

Research Papers in Computer Science Essay Since we recently announced our $10001 Binary Battle to promote applications built on the Mendeley API (now including PLoS as well), I decided to take a look at the data to see what people have to work with. My analysis focused on our second largest discipline, Computer Science. Biological Sciences (my discipline) is the largest, but I started with this one so that I could look at the data with fresh eyes, and also because it’s got some really cool papers to talk about. Here’s what I found: What I found was a fascinating list of topics, with many of the expected fundamental papers like Shannon’s Theory of Information and the Google paper, a strong showing from Mapreduce and machine learning, but also some interesting hints that augmented reality may be becoming more of an actual reality soon. The top graph summarizes the overall results of the analysis. This graph shows the Top 10 papers among those who have listed computer science as their discipline and chosen a subdiscipline. The bars are colored according to subdiscipline and the number of readers is shown on the x-axis. The bar graphs for each paper show the distribution of readership levels among subdisciplines. 17 of the 21 CS subdisciplines are represented and the axis scales and color schemes remain constant throughout. Click on any graph to explore it in more detail or to grab the raw data.(NB: A minority of Computer Scientists have listed a subdiscipline. I would encourage everyone to do so.) 1. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (available full-text) LDA is a means of classifying objects, such as documents, based on their underlying topics. I was surprised to see this paper as number one instead of Shannon’s information theory paper (#7) or the paper describing the concept that became Google (#3). It turns out that interest in this paper is very strong among those who list artificial intelligence as their subdiscipline. In fact, AI researchers contributed the majority of readership to 6 out of the top 10 papers. Presumably, those interested in popular topics such as machine learning list themselves under AI, which explains the strength of this subdiscipline, whereas papers like the Mapreduce one or the Google paper appeal to a broad range of subdisciplines, giving those papers a smaller numbers spread across more subdisciplines. Professor Blei is also a bit of a superstar, so that didn’t hurt. (the irony of a manually-categorized list with an LDA paper at the top has not escaped us) 2. MapReduce : Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters (available full-text) It’s no surprise to see this in the Top 10 either, given the huge appeal of this parallelization technique for breaking down huge computations into easily executable and recombinable chunks. The importance of the monolithic â€Å"Big Iron† supercomputer has been on the wane for decades. The interesting thing about this paper is that had some of the lowest readership scores of the top papers within a subdiscipline, but folks from across the entire spectrum of computer science are reading it. This is perhaps expected for such a general purpose technique, but given the above it’s strange that there are no AI readers of this paper at all. 3. The Anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual search engine (available full-text) In this paper, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page discuss how Google was created and how it initially worked. This is another paper that has high readership across a broad swath of disciplines, including AI, but wasn’t dominated by any one discipline. I would expect that the largest share of readers have it in their library mostly out of curiosity rather than direct relevance to their research. It’s a fascinating piece of history related to something that has now become part of our every day lives. 4. Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints This paper was new to me, although I’m sure it’s not new to many of you. This paper describes how to identify objects in a video stream without regard to how near or far away they are or how they’re oriented with respect to the camera. AI again drove the popularity of this paper in large part and to understand why, think â€Å"Augmented Realityâ€Å". AR is the futuristic idea most familiar to the average sci-fi enthusiast as Terminator-vision. Given the strong interest in the topic, AR could be closer than we think, but we’ll probably use it to layer Groupon deals over shops we pass by instead of building unstoppable fighting machines. 5. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (available full-text) This is another machine learning paper and its presence in the top 10 is primarily due to AI, with a small contribution from folks listing neural networks as their discipline, most likely due to the paper being published in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. Reinforcement learning is essentially a technique that borrows from biology, where the behavior of an intelligent agent is is controlled by the amount of positive stimuli, or reinforcement, it receives in an environment where there are many different interacting positive and negative stimuli. This is how we’ll teach the robots behaviors in a human fashion, before they rise up and destroy us. 6. Toward the next generation of recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions (available full-text) Popular among AI and information retrieval researchers, this paper discusses recommendation algorithms and classifies them into collaborative, content-based, or hybrid. While I wouldn’t call this paper a groundbreaking event of the caliber of the Shannon paper above, I can certainly understand why it makes such a strong showing here. If you’re using Mendeley, you’re using both collaborative and content-based discovery methods! 7. A Mathematical Theory of Communication (available full-text) Now we’re back to more fundamental papers. I would really have expected this to be at least number 3 or 4, but the strong showing by the AI discipline for the machine learning papers in spots 1, 4, and 5 pushed it down. This paper discusses the theory of sending communications down a noisy channel and demonstrates a few key engineering parameters, such as entropy, which is the range of states of a given communication. It’s one of the more fundamental papers of computer science, founding the field of information theory and enabling the development of the very tubes through which you received this web page you’re reading now. It’s also the first place the word â€Å"bit†, short for binary digit, is found in the published literature. 8. The Semantic Web (available full-text) In The Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Sir Tim, the inventor of the World Wide Web, describes his vision for the web of the future. Now, 10 years later, it’s fascinating to look back though it and see on which points the web has delivered on its promise and how far away we still remain in so many others. This is different from the other papers above in that it’s a descriptive piece, not primary research as above, but still deserves it’s place in the list and readership will only grow as we get ever closer to his vision. 9. Convex Optimization (available full-text) This is a very popular book on a widely used optimization technique in signal processing. Convex optimization tries to find the provably optimal solution to an optimization problem, as opposed to a nearby maximum or minimum. While this seems like a highly specialized niche area, it’s of importance to machine learning and AI researchers, so it was able to pull in a nice readership on Mendeley. Professor Boyd has a very popular set of video classes at Stanford on the subject, which probably gave this a little boost, as well. The point here is that print publications aren’t the only way of communicating your ideas. Videos of techniques at SciVee or JoVE or recorded lectures (previously) can really help spread awareness of your research. 10. Object recognition from local scale-invariant features (available in full-text) This is another paper on the same topic as paper #4, and it’s by the same author. Looking across subdisciplines as we did here, it’s not surprising to see two related papers, of interest to the main driving discipline, appear twice. Adding the readers from this paper to the #4 paper would be enough to put it in the #2 spot, just below the LDA paper. Conclusions So what’s the moral of the story? Well, there are a few things to note. First of all, it shows that Mendeley readership data is good enough to reveal both papers of long-standing importance as well as interesting upcoming trends. Fun stuff can be done with this! How about a Mendeley leaderboard? You could grab the number of readers for each paper published by members of your group, and have some friendly competition to see who can get the most readers, month-over-month. Comparing yourself against others in terms of readers per paper could put a big smile on your face, or it could be a gentle nudge to get out to more conferences or maybe record a video of your technique for JoVE or Khan Academy or just Youtube. Another thing to note is that these results don’t necessarily mean that AI researchers are the most influential researchers or the most numerous, just the best at being accounted for. To make sure you’re counted properly, be sure you list your subdiscipline on your profile, or if you can’t find your exact one, pick the closest one, like the machine learning folks did with the AI subdiscipline. We recognize that almost everyone does interdisciplinary work these days. We’re working on a more flexible discipline assignment system, but for now, just pick your favorite one. These stats were derived from the entire readership history, so they do reflect a founder effect to some degree. Limiting the analysis to the past 3 months would probably reveal different trends and comparing month-to-month changes could reveal rising stars.