IS Operations Management and Supply Chain Management

I found an article online by Micheal W. Toffel that dealth with problems in operation management. This article is titled "Operational Failures and Problem Solving: An Empricial Study of Incident Reporting," and explains what happens when operational failures occur within a company. Although minor and major incidents occur within every coorporation this article focuses on hospitals. "Using data on nearly 7,500 reported incidents from a single hospital, the researchers found that problem-solving in response to operational failures is influenced by both the risk posed by the incident and the extent to which management demonstrates a commitment to problem-solving." What they mean by this is with out a good operations management, with a good strategic system in place, every company is valneable to operation failure. Toffel predicts that if you have a good commited manager that encourages front-line employees to inflict problem-solving skills the majority of your failures can be avoided. This is good common business knowledge to keep in mind when operating a coorporation to avoid systematic problem-solving errors that could indeed cost you money in the long run.

The Art of Mobile Technology

I found this Art of mobile Technology article online but it originated in the Globe Newspaper. In this article there was one specific art project that caught my eye. The project was entitled the yellow arrow project and was based in New York City about 10 years ago. What the Yellow arrow project did was allow peoplw to place stickers in the shapes of yellow arrows in all different locations throughout the New York City.
These yellow arrow stickers made the location where it had been placed significant to the individual who placed it there. People took advantage of this project and placed arrows everywhere from their favorite diners to points they found interesting around the city. Some business people even used these arrows as advertising and promoted their projects. Although this project hit New York first in the U.S., it originated in Toronto, Canada and has now expanded to more than two thousand arrows worldwide.
These yellow arrows where all connected to an electronic map that enables users to veiw their location and the significance of the arrow. This is really handy because if i wanted to get peoples opinions and factual evidence on a resturante or a park i can do this online before making my decision on weather to eat at the resturante or attend the park for a walk. This is also benificial to businesses for advertising perposes, because they can advertise free of charge.

IS 130 Databases and Data Warehouses

For chapter 6 i found an article by Ari Baumgarten and it deals with Data Cleansing for data warehouses. I though this article was relevant to chapter six because they use an Extract, Trasnform, and Load technique to make sure all their data stored in their warehouse is uniform. These vendor supplied (ETL) tools are very appropriate in order to be time efficient. I'm going to give you an example of what this tool does, okay so a persons name can be stored in several forms. i.e. John Smith, Smith, John, or John H. Smith what this (ETL) program does is load the names of all the coustomers and store them all the same way, such as Smith, John. Now this is very important because when someone is manually searching through the data wharehouse it would be very easy for them to get quite confused if all the data were not uniform. However with this (ETL) program searching through the warehouse is a breeze. There are also various other (ETL) tools depending on who you buy your software from that can be very benificial to your business in ways such as budget, complexity, and schedualed events. So if your going to store data in a wharehouse use Data cleansing for your wharehouse it will make things much easier.