Enterprise 2.0

Social networking has exploded as perhaps one of the biggest parts of the use of the Internet. Like most things people are interested in, business tried to implement them into their infrastructure and involve the average, everyday person. What was once a cool trick and perhaps showing off of resources,, has now become a necessary part of a business enterprise. People can connect with other colleagues with online profiles and find people relevant to the information they need or the task they need to complete. News feeds like, like any other social network, are a large part as well, providing constant updates, information, and discussion to the work place [1]. This new phase of business is powered by the huge popularity in social networks, and the evolution of web based programs becoming more powerful and useful. Enterprise 2.0 allows for the business to learn and communicate as a whole, and to break through any barriers the different positions may have between them [2].

Yet these programs have a high failure rate. 90% of Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) programs rot away to their cyber deaths around the first months [2]. They often fail from issues that include: an initial enthusiasm followed by slow decline, only one department of the business strongly adopts the ESN, the culture confusions and lack of executive engagement stymied growth from the start, and lack of social business maturity [3]. Seeing as this is starting to be widely considered to be a huge part of the communication process in a modern business, this could greatly damage the efficiency and “hive-mind” of the people in the network. But clearly a common factor is behind each of these main reasons of failure: The humans behind it. With proper training and understanding of these systems, the biggest reasons behind an ESN failure can be avoided. With a successful ESN, employees are encouraged to share, they capture knowledge, can enable action, and empower themselves and others[3].

All of these effects to employees has one purpose as well, and that is to give the customer a better experience[4]. All these actions; the communications, actions, interactions between the employees and colleagues; is to be aimed at the customer wants and demands. That allows these social networking systems to have a real goal and create an actual purpose for itself. So the bottom line is, Enterprise 2.0 technologies should be used to self organize a businesses’ efforts to please customer wants. Along the way, the employees enjoy the experience and make the customer experience even better in the end.

Source 1(Fundamentals of Information Systems page 195)

Source 2(http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2011/04/22/enterprise-2-0-why-all-business-software-must-go-social/)

Source 3(http://www.briansolis.com/2012/03/enterprise-social-networking/)\

Source 4(http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/06/21/enterprise-social-media-its-all-about-the-customer

SQL Tables

SELECT month ("Date")  "Month" ,"Region","Product Category","Profit","Profit per Item" FROM "Sales" WHERE "Region" = 'West' AND "Profit">500 link= https://reports.zoho.com/ZDBDataSheetView.cc?OBJID=794004000000006022&STANDALONE=true&privatelink=af1696d31521a08719e5035290bc5a43&ZDB_THEME_NAME=blue&DATATYPESYMBOL=false&REMTOOLBAR=true&SEARCHBOX=true&SHOWHIDEOPT=true This Query Table is valuable as it will see the profitable product categories for this business in The Western region, which can be compared to the other table's profits. SELECT "Date","Product Category","Product","Customer Name","Sales","Profit" FROM "Sales" WHERE "Region" = 'East' AND "Profit">500 This Query allows for the comparison in profit link= https://reports.zoho.com/ZDBDataSheetView.cc?OBJID=794004000000006141&STANDALONE=true&privatelink=7f622c31f6faae3b7d57ce2570499d16&ZDB_THEME_NAME=blue&DATATYPESYMBOL=false&REMTOOLBAR=true&SEARCHBOX=true&SHOWHIDEOPT=true This Query Table allows for the comparison of profitable product categories(+500) from the Eastern region to the Western region of the other table. One can see which area has more, and how much more profitable categories of items to determine where to focus shipping products.

Virtual Reality

The past few years, Virtual Reality (VR) has started to come to fruition. While still perhaps not advanced enough to be more universal, it’s no longer just a gimmick. “It’s reaching a level of maturity,” said James Oliver, director of the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University. “And you can get a very compelling virtual-reality system without having a huge, huge budget.”(2) Which is a considerable accomplishment as the concept and technology is as old as computer graphics itself.(1) As virtual reality has advanced (projectors, graphic cards, and computer software) and the power needed to run it has become a lot cheaper, it has become more accessible like most technologies.(2) VR isn’t just a clumsy set of goggles on your head. Businesses are using VR to help test screen products, train employees or other users, and tour business locations. (3) With the technology based around testing products, businesses like car manufacturers can build and design cars virtually, and test them in different environments under changing conditions. This can save time, energy, and money building the real thing and offer a chance to fix an overlook in the design or any problems that arise in the tests before committing to a particular build. This is also a safer way to test things as well. These companies are growing fast at a rate of 10 to 12 percent a year and are currently a 1.5 billion dollar business. (2) Similar for its ability to lower costs and avoid any potential danger, VR training programs are becoming very valuable. Training type programs can vary from traditional feeling virtual classroom environments to simulations allowing multiple students to role-play with each other or computer AI to practice job related skills and perform critical tasks.(4) It also allows people to connect with the actions. The NASA Mars Science Laboratory flight was simulated in a program that showed important and informative information while allowing you to maneuver the camera around as it recreated the actions happening in real life. This kind of interaction lets the customer or user feel much more connected and mentally invested. This kind of connection is also important for meetings. When businesses want to have meetings with several people perhaps across the country they will sometimes use virtual worlds. With companies coming out with new private programs for businesses alone, this allows for users to relate to others around them more personally than an email or phone call.(4) Virtual Reality has come far in its usefulness to businesses. Similar to perhaps 3d in its maturity and the distance its come since the 80’s, VR will continue to improve and see itself in more and more applications. Source 1: http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/lesson17.html Source 2: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16599296/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/virtual-reality-spreading-business/#.UB8iI2iLT7U Source 3: http://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality-applications/business.html Source 4: http://www.hrmreport.com/article/Virtual-Reality-The-Playground-Is-Now-Serious-Business/

Role of DSS

To run your business, you need to make the right decisions.  Decisions support systems can make picking the right decisions a lot easier for you. Creating and setting up a system to do that may be quite costly now, but the ultimate potential value it can create will be well worth it. They can speed up decisions, help make decisions more beneficial, plan on its future use, and inform you on why they worked and give information relevant to what you need to think about now. “Some information that information systems might gather and present would be: comparative sales figures between one week and the next, projective revenue figures based on new product sale assumptions, or the consequences of different decision alternatives, given past experience in a context that is described.”

Decision support systems “are a collection of integrated software applications and hardware that form the backbone of an organization’s decision-making process”. A DSS is comparable to a KMS in the fact it uses data to help understand and distribute knowledge. When running or being a part of the decision making process, it is sometimes quite difficult being overloaded with tons of information. With a DSS, one can focus on the more important information, and perhaps leave out most of the work involving calculating and organizing data. This leave s the user with more time to decide which steps they should make, rather than finding out which steps there are to take. The information should be flexible enough for a user to get all they need to know from data collected (this is also important. DSS work by using already collected data. The more data you have to use, the more realistic and informative your DSS will be).

In conclusion, DSS define the moves of the planners in the business world. DSS go up a step from just stores of data and can help you determine what could be important things to consider, as well as creating a shortcut past the calculating of what data can mean and perhaps even planning what a decision can do to the data. Things such as graphical analysis (“Study of independent phenomena by analyzing graphical representations”) make understanding data more digestible and relays information well from someone well versed in data collection and its meanings to someone more knowledgeable in other aspects of business. People don’t always wants to let a computer run their every decision, and that’s understandable. Being able to think about steps to take and understanding data should be a skill anyone part of a business should know; but having something break things down into finer details and at a considerably fast pace can be extremely beneficial.

Source 1 http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/decision-support-system

Source 2 http://www.microstrategy.com/decision-support-system/

Source 3 http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/graphical+analysis

Intranet

The Internet has changed the course of knowledge distribution for the world. This vast network has allowed for the quick, almost instantaneous delivery of messages, news, and information. It’s no wonder why companies use this to gain access to information. Yet a public system would not be the safest one. So they create an intranet. This is when the Internet is used privately by a company to link selected resources with suppliers, customers, and other business partners. (The Book)When outsiders of a company use a network to view some of the in formation from the intranet, that new network is an extranet. (Source 1)

An intranet can use software such as Ethernet (a locally based network of computers and technology), Wi-Fi, TCP/IP (, Web browsers and web servers. The intranet is usually firewalled to protect the computers from outside access. (Source 2) Bob Taylor (internet pioneer who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer along with other related technologies (Source 4)) imagined the intranet at first in at least 1966. The Internet started out initially as an intranet. (Source 3) Meaning that at first, the Internet was simply a resource for companies and organizations for distributing information. The Internet grew, simplified, and became a part of more casual users until it was a common application among the general population it is today.

Intranets utilize the sheer magnitude of the Internet now for business use. It’s an interesting view on how applications, networks, and similarly organizations in business or anything requiring efficiency and speed will divide itself into simpler parts. This smaller part is now more easily manageable and “monitor-able”.

Source 1

http://compnetworking.about.com/od/filetransferprotocol/Intranets_and_Extranets.htm

Source 2

http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/intranets/g/bldef_intranet.htm

Source 3 http://www.mail-archive.com/www-talk@w3.org/msg01129.html

Source 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scientist)

Cloud Computing

In this post I’m going to explain cloud computing and what it’s emergence means for the business and IT world.

Simply put, Cloud Computing allows for other computers to do the workload of yours. Slightly more technically, the user/client’s computer connects through a network to the “cloud”. As stated before, this passing of the workload allows the user’s computer to operate the software they want without having to get more software or hardware. All that’s needed of the user’s computer something to reach the cloud, which may very well be just a standard web browser. (Source 1 page 1)

Cloud computing works on two ends: the user’s side, and the cloud side. The user’s end requires the user’s computer and the software needed to access the cloud. This can be as stated earlier a standard web browser, but in other instances specific and unique applications are required. The other side is the cloud side. This features computers, data storage systems, and servers. This side works by having the server run the whole operation as smoothly as possible, following what is called protocols. Protocols are a set of rules that a server follows when operating the system.  Servers use middleware to allow the computers in the server to communicate with each other. (Source 1 page 2)

Servers don’t usually run at full capacity so the utilize server virtualization. (Source 1) Server virtualization can reduce server sprawl, make server resourced used more efficiently, for testing and development, centralize server administration, improve server availability, and to assist in disaster recovery. (Source 4)

What does cloud computing mean for the IT industry? The transition of a business to use cloud computing needs oversight and guidance from the business’s IT department. Less staff is needed as well in the IT department as the majority of issues would most likely be on the server end, handled by a different company. (Source 2)

I imagine software and even hardware companies must figure out how to deal with what changes cloud computing will bring to their economic designs. They must change the ways they create and develop applications. (Source 2) Yet while demand of their initial software may diminish, as it is needed in “fewer quantities”, software companies could make other tools to monitor the software performance on the cloud. Also, programs that work with different clouds will become important as well when more companies shift to cloud networks. (Source 3)

In conclusion, Cloud Computing will vastly reduce costs and energy in the computer world for a business relying heavily on their computers. Like most of these changes, it’s best to embrace them to  keep up with the opposition and keep your business running smoothly.

Source 1 http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cloud-computing/cloud-computing1.htm

Source 2 http://www.rickscloud.com/how-is-cloud-computing-influencing-the-it-industry/

Source 3 http://www.software-marketing-advisor.com/cloud-computing.html

Source 4 http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/definition/server-virtualization

Hardware and Software

Hardware 1 An Apple IPhone or similar mobile device. The first step to mobilizing my business. My employees can use tools and programs that they would normally have to be at a home computer for on the go. Has mobile tethering to access internet anywhere. 199 2 A laptop is also important. More tools and programs available on the computer, and it’s a much more reliable and user-friendly instrument to do business on than a cell phone. Inspiron 14z ultrabook dell 699.99 3 Neat Desk (Scanner) This is hardware one can use on the field to scan a document to turn into digital files. 399.95 Software 4 A program like Skyper/Oovoo for conducting face-to-face talks and even group communication. Helps show more clearly who is talking about what than a phone call, and more personal than an email. Free 5 I would get a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to allow my employees to access files remotely and securely. This allows them the same freedom of information on a mobile device as if they were in the office. “Establish encrypted VPN tunnels with the Cisco VPN Client for highly secure remote connectivity for your mobile employees or teleworkers.“(http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/secursw/ps2308/index.html )  It’s also safe, so I don’t have to worry about security issues. Cisco would seem to be the particular brand/product. Not sure of price Software