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.

IS 130 Enterprise Architecture

For chapter 5 i found a very interesting article that describes the importance of Enterprise Architecture also known as (EA). The article is titled "Enterprise Architecture: What and Why" by Tom Finerran and goes into depth on what enterprise architecture is and why it is important. Another thing explained in the article is what EA does for Senior business management, IT leadership, and the actual developers.

On this website there is a figure showing an EA analysis that explains how EA helps define business processes in need of improvement. There are times in business when re-engineering is a must and EA provides a solid starting point for this to occur. Finneran also helps the ignorant by pointing out the four main EA topics which include; Information, business, application, and technology.

Overall Finnerman's article does an excellent job of describing the importance of EA to the public or perhaps future business owners. Reading this article before looking into chapter 5 gave me a good intial understanding of EA and helped my quiz and summary flow well.

IS 130 Ethics and Information Security

The article i choose is about protecting your perssonal identity online. The author Erika Rottenberg a Berkley graduate explains how easy it is for people on the web to obtain your information from social networking site. Millions of people today use sites such as myspace and facebook and sometimes put a little to much information about themselevs online for the world to see. Hackers and people who steal identities see sites such as these as gold mines.
This article is relevant to chapter four because it deals with both Ethics and Security Information. After reading the text I would feel more comfortable starting up my own personal business without the worries of having information stolen. Not only is it not ethical to steal information its just plain wrong.

IS 130. Chapter 3 EBusiness

The article i choose to do my write-up on for chapter 3 is titled "Former IBM colleagues, now laid off, take a shot at entrepreneurship." This article is about Brain Garr and Moe Almutawa venturing out after being laid off by IBM to help citizens in search for jobs. Both Garr and Almutawa like the concept of helping people and hope they can be successful in doing so. These men are very educated in technology previously working for IBM has been very benificial to them both.

Garr and Almutawa intended to provide residents and small business owners with on-site technology support; technicians help with networking, hardware and software issues, website design, hosting and other technology issues a client might have.

Garr says, "I was losing contact with a community I had become very friendly with, though it was not a surprise," he said. "At the same time, it was exciting. I wanted to build something where I could create jobs."

This is all relevant to chapter three because these two men rely on E Business now for their newly found careers. There was a study done that said, "Annually, nearly 80 percent will have failed in their solo venture in the first twelve months," However, "The failure rate for those who buy a franchise is less than 5 percent."

Many of these failures are due to a lack of clientele base, often dealing with businesses opened online.

IS 130 In Business

The first chapter Information in Busniess explains the importance of technology in the business world. This chapter kicks off giving examples of information technology used in every day business. Basically there must be a good relationship between people, information, and information technology in order for any business to be successful. This chapter also makes it clear that know days technology is business and vis versa.
One of the most important things i got out of this chapter was the competitive advantage stratagy. There are two different competitive advantages one being the first-mover advantage and the other is simply competitive advantage. When a company has a product on the market first for a significant period of time, this is an example of the first-mover advantage. The competitive advatage is when a business draws a consumers attention. Although, there are similar products for that consumer to consider, he/she is more interested in your product often because of good advertising/marketing.
A few more things information technology has accomplished in the business world are become a significant part of an organizations strategy and profitability. It is key in any business for a manager to have a good understanding of IT if the business plans on progressing and making a good profit. For example a manager needs to know what strategies can help and what strategies will harm his/her business. Today it is safe to say it is dangerous not to understand It if involved in business management.
A final must in an organazation is to have good tools to use once a strategy is choosen. This chapter puts an emphasis on the value chain. the value chain looks at an organization like a set of processes, and each process adds value to the product or service.