Information Technology And Business Management

Pros and cons of always being available to employers and clients

Question 1: Information technology makes it possible to “never be out of touch.” Discuss the pros and cons of always being available to your employers and clients

There is always a good side and a bad side to never being out of touch for the employer as well as the client.  The pros for never being out of touch one could be there at the moment notice in order to fix any issue, which may arise, with both the employer and the clients. Moreover, one can increase on the productivity as well as dependability aspects in the workplace. Additionally, one could receive good complement in form of perhaps a promotion as a result of their dedication (Armbrust, Fox, Griffith, Joseph, Katz, Konwinski, Lee, Patterson, Rabkin, Stoica and Zaharia, 2010). As an employer being available all the time for the workers could be beneficial since they would appreciate, you are always being open as well as available to aid any issues. On the cons, there are certain jobs, which requires off-hour work. In case the clients have the pleasure of contacting whomever they want, thus they are able. This could be disturbing and could cause long hours especially for the unpaid work. It could cut on the personal time as well as take time for people from their family or even friends. Additionally, being out of touch could affect on the productivity since one is stretched a lot and even one can be demoted for not being able to handle their functions of their job description.

Question 2.  Describe the five forces in Porter’s competitive forces model and explain how the internet has affected each one.

The five forces in the porter’s competitiveness are; cost leadership innovation, differentiation, operational effectiveness as well as the customer orientation. Cost leadership is all about producing of the products as well as the goods at the lowest cost possible in the industry.  The internet has affected on this factor since it allows the firms to locate the lowest costs of the goods, which are required at the lowest cost possible (Lin, Fu, Zhu and Dasmalchi, 2009).  Differentiation is producing products, or perhaps the services, which are different from the competitors (Grundy, 2006). The internet has influenced this factor because the company could browse and search on the products they are looking for and then customize them depending on the way they want. Innovation factor is all about adding new features to the product or service that existed or even develop new ways in order to produce them. The internet has influenced innovation on the influx for the new ideas as well as thoughts on the internet to the way of improving the products. Operational effectiveness helps to improve on the way that an organization could undertake the internal business processes to enable it to perform these activities much more efficiently than the competitors could (Lin, Fu, Zhu and Dasmalchi,  2009).  The internet has impacted on the operational effectiveness through allowing of the firm to search for the competitors and then try improving on way they operate much better. The other aspect is on the customer orientation, which concentrate on making the customers satisfied and happy. The internet could create a personalized and a one to one relationship with each of the clients.

Impact of the internet on Porter’s competitive forces model

Question 3.  Compare and contrast tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.

Tacit and the explicit are the two kinds of knowledge. Knowing the differences and similarities between these two is  a step towards the direction of the knowledge management. The differences between the two is outlined as follows:

Explicit knowledge

Explicit knowledge is obtained with the help of the documents which are written which have been codified whereas the tacit knowledge it is the opposite of the codified knowledge.  On the explicit knowledge the knowledge could be stored as well as transmitted from one place to another or even from one individual to another (Herness, High and McGee, 2004). On the other hand, tacit knowledge cannot be transferred easily from one individual to another by writing it down or perhaps by means of the words.  The explicit knowledge it is much easy to retrieve from the media. On the other hand, tacit knowledge the ability in making a difficult computer language is a knowledge or perhaps the ability for the expertly use of the complex machinery could be the knowledge which cannot be written. In explicit knowledge there is usually a mechanism for the transfer whereas in tacit there is no such mechanism.  The similarities between the two is that they are used in various types of organizations. They both represent extremes in the spectrum in order to enable the knower to be able to articulate on the content they provide (Sanchez, 2004). Lastly, in both there is some knowledge is gained which could be used to make changes in an organization or to individual.

Question 4.  Search online for the article from The Atlantic: ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ Is Google making us stupid? Support your answer.

Yes. Google has been hampering on our ability of recalling information. Based on research it has been found that google improves of various kind of memory such as the methods for retrieval of the information. Nonetheless, it is important to note that the impacts of the usage of the internet is very complicated (Sanchez, 2004). According to science, we are not losing on our ability to remember things but rather the internet is changing on the way in which we remember. People are recalling on the information less but they can remember to where they had found it. Another thing with the internet is that there are certain memory, which are improving. This happens when the brain reroutes especially on how we are recalling of the information. It is able to develop various kind of memory capabilities.

Question 5. Will Business Intelligence (BI) replace business analysts?

Yes, I think this would be possible in the near future. The use business intelligence will be dependent on the historical data in order to learn from the past decision.  There has been advancement in the artificial intelligence, which has become mind blowing (Herness, High and McGee, 2004). There has been advancement to the levels such that robot are being taught problem solving skills. There could be aspect of singularity if this trend continues where there is accelerated progress in the technologies, which would cause a runaway impact where artificial intelligence could exceed on the human intellectual capacity as well as the control. Problem solving skills is what the business analysis professional undertake, they are problem solvers (Zhao, Tanniru and Zhang, 2007). The technology will have sosphicated enough for the robots to take the role of the business analytics and the companies could hire the business intelligence anywhere across the world (Pfleeger and Pfleeger, 2002). The robot may become better problem solvers in the near future in comparison to people.in the near future. The technology would likely continue to change on how people work or live, the robots are likely to be the next generation for the business intelligence. I think they could add value to organization through relying on the past historical data and analyse it to provide the best course of action to take when solving a given problem that have arisen since they are fast than the humans.

Differences between tacit and explicit knowledge

Question 6.   Is security a technical issue, a business issue or both? Provide a rationale for your answer.

Security is both a technical and a business issue. It is a technical issue since the hacker could access any type of the mobile device. The security days just as the technical issues are gone. It has become the central concern for the leaders at the various level of the organization as well as government (Smith and Fingar, 2003). The customers are demanding it as worries in regards to their privacy, and protection of their personal data and the identify theft as it grows.  Moreover, the partners, suppliers as well as the vendor also are requiring it among themselves more so when they provide mutual access of the network (Herness, High and McGee, 2004). There are concern of networked efforts in order to steal on the information of the competitor intelligence. There have been security breaches as well as the data disclosure, which have risen from the behavior of the criminal who are motivated by the financial gain. The information technology is no longer focused on solving the problem; it has become the basis for the survival of the business just like any other issue affecting the business. All the organization usually depend on the various usage of the information technology system in order to enable as well as support on the processes of the business (Herness, High and McGee, 2004). It ranges from the email as well as messenger for communication purposes, to management systems for document for collaboration as well as the ERP systems used for the performance-integrated processes of the business. To enable the end users in completing their tasks more effectively these systems should allow an access to the functions the workers need in performing their duties.

Question 7.   How can an organisation best employ social computing technologies and applications to benefit its business processes?

The organization could use social computing in order to make things to be more convenient and much easier especially for the shoppers. This could work through setting of websites as well as pages for the Facebook and the twitters that enables the consumers to be able to interact and provide their feedback directly to the company (O’Brien and Marakas, 2005).

Extraction of the benefits from the social tools as well as techniques entails an upfront aspect of understanding of the objective of the business and the implementation of the plan, which infuses on the traditional systems to a much greater collaboration capabilities in order to be able to engage with both the external and the internal stakeholders. Each organization could embrace on the social computing in one way or another (O’Brien and Marakas, 2005). Organization should start with small initiative like the social media Facebook and twitter or they could take the approach of the enterprise for example develop on a social strategy as well as supporting it with the enterprise wide workers collaboration application or perhaps  social platform in order to connect better with the consumers to their brands.

Effect of Google on memory

Question 8.  In some cases, individuals engage in cybersquatting so that they can sell the domain names to companies expensively.  In other cases, companies engage in cybersquatting by registering domain names that are very similar to their competitors’ domain names in order to generate traffic from people who misspell web addresses. Discuss each practice in terms of its ethical nature and legality. Is there a difference between the two practices? Support your answer.

Cybersquatting is all about the practices of registering or perhaps utilizing a domain name for the benefit of profiting from the goodwill or perhaps a trademark, which belongs to another individual. According to the cybersquatting customer, Act of 1999 provides trademark owners especially in the USA to sue for any damages in such cases.

There are some practices which could be considered cybersquatting yet they are not illegal but they could be deemed unethical. An example of such practice is that of domain tasting. This is where the registrars could profit from the complex money trail of the pay per click type of advertising. Such a practice could be traced back to the policies of which was responsible for such regulation of the names of the web, the internet corporation for the Assigned Names and the Numbers. According to this body ICANN back in 2000 they had formulated the create grace period (O’Brien and Marakas, 2005). This was a period in which the organization or an individual could claim on the domain name and they then return it to be given a full refund of six dollars for the registry fee. This period was a five days interval and the ICANN implemented on this policy in order to allow individual who mistyped a given domain to return it without incurring on the cost.

The domain tasters did exploit on this policy through claiming that the internet domain for the five days at no cost. These domain names usually resembled on those of the companies, which are prominent. These individuals usually jammed on these domains, which have advertisements from the Google as well as Yahoo (Zhao, Tanniru and Zhang, 2007). The process usually involved zero risk and there was one hundred percent profit margins. The taster they usually register millions of domain name each day. The experts have found out that the registrants because of this ultimately purchase less than two percent of the sites they sample. In the overall picture, they utilize the domain name for few days and they generated many profits.

Question 9.  Investigate the role of the web in human resources management.

Many of the human resource information system are usually delivered through the Human resource portal. The key role of the information system are the Human resource maintenance and the development, human resource planning and the management, and the recruitment. Recruitment entails finding of the potential workers, evaluating on them as well as deciding on which individuals to hire (Marston, Li, Bandyopadhyay, Zhang and Ghalsasi, 2011). Organization usually are trying to find the appropriate individuals on the web, with the help of the specialized search engines. Organization they are also advertising on the hundreds of thousands of the jobs on the web. The online recruiting could read to more candidates that could bring better applicants. Moreover, the cost for the online recruitment are essentially lower than the traditional recruiting techniques for example the advertising in the newspaper or perhaps the trade journals (Papazoglou, 2001)When the staff are recruited, they essentially become part of the corporate human resource pool that means they could be evaluated, maintained as well and developed. Information technology usually provide support to such activities. Information technology could play a significant role especially to the training as well as retraining.  Some of the most innovative developments usually takes place in places that are intelligent; computer aided instruction as well as the application for the multimedia support for the instructional activities. An example is the corporate training, which is essentially derived over the organization intranet or perhaps the web (Papazoglou, 2001). The information technology could provide support to the payroll as well as the workers records, and the benefits administration. This is regarded as the employee’s resource management.

Question 10. Differentiate between customer-facing CRM applications and customer-touching CRM applications

In the customer facing the CRM applications the firms’ sales, field service, as well as the interaction of the customers centre representative interact directly with the clients. These applications usually include the customer services and the support, sales force automation and the marketing (O’Brien and Marakas, 2005). In the customer touching the CRM applications, the customers usually interact with the technologies as well as applications using the application in order to help themselves.

References

Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A.D., Katz, R., Konwinski, A., Lee, G., Patterson, D., Rabkin, A., Stoica, I. and Zaharia, M., 2010. A view of cloud computing. Communications of the ACM, 53(4), pp.50-58.

Grundy, T., 2006. Rethinking and reinventing Michael Porter’s five forces model. Strategic Change, 15(5), pp.213-229.

Herness, E.N., High, R.J. and McGee, J.R., 2004. WebSphere Application Server: A foundation for on demand computing. IBM Systems Journal, 43(2), pp.213-237. 

Lin, G., Fu, D., Zhu, J. and Dasmalchi, G., 2009. Cloud computing: IT as a service. IT Professional Magazine, 11(2), p.10.

Marston, S., Li, Z., Bandyopadhyay, S., Zhang, J. and Ghalsasi, A., 2011. Cloud computing The business perspective. Decision support systems, 51(1), pp.176-189.

O’Brien, J.A. and Marakas, G., 2005. Introduction to information systems. McGraw-Hill, Inc..

Papazoglou, M.P., 2001. Agent-oriented technology in support of e-business. Communications of the ACM, 44(4), pp.71-77.

Pfleeger, C.P. and Pfleeger, S.L., 2002. Security in computing. Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference.

Sanchez, R., 2004. Tacit knowledge versus explicit knowledge. Approaches to knowledge management practice.

Smith, H. and Fingar, P., 2003. Business process management: the third wave (Vol. 1). Tampa: Meghan-Kiffer Press.

Zhao, J.L., Tanniru, M. and Zhang, L.J., 2007. Services computing as the foundation of enterprise agility: Overview of recent advances and introduction to the special issue. Information Systems Frontiers, 9(1), pp.1-8.