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