MIS and DSS

The main goal of MIS is in allowing you to see (like in those sci-fi movies) the entities of the real world as they really are in all their properties, changing views, angles and focuses as you need to inspect some features closer and some from a bigger perspective. For example, when you walk through the College you actually do not see much beyond the walls, offices, and posters. Once you access the College MIS – you immediately see (supposedly) all involved entites and processes in their normal activities and deviations that have to be notices and corrected. Augmented reality (AR) allows you to combine physical vision with MIS orientation (this is where the research on MIS and AR will be appropriate!).

Decision Support Systems serve not as much as vision enhancers but as enhancers of your abilities of making decisions based on the vision. Human abilities to juggle numbers and keep various relationships among multiple parameters in mind are severely limited. Here come DSS. They allow you to use such tools as scenarios (when you change some assumptions and see what will happen to ALL parts you are interested in by providing formulas of the corresponding relationships), optimization (when the system quickly finds for you the best decision among many possible), and many others. Armed with such tools (especially now available in mobile formats) you become super beings (cyborgs, if you wish, as part human and part systems) far more advanced in your mental abilities than those who doesn’t use special supporting systems. I actually run a special course fully dedicated to DSS where students learn the decision theory (on how to always make best decisions in all situations) as well as how to arm yourselves with simple (and more advanced) DSS dramatically enhancing your decision making abilities and outcomes in all your activities. Recently one student emailed me that he got a job because of this knowledge.

You can use this power throughout all your life experiences no matter what you do and where you work. Although many industrial systems of this kind are very expensive, there are some simple tools (like spreadsheets in advanced forms of use) that already upgrade your abilities significantly. Some of them we are learning in this course. This is kung fu of modern life. The more work and understanding efforts of the material of this week you apply – the more you will get out of it. This is the way to compete with AI allowing the mankind to stay relevant.

A Small Case of E-commerce and E-Business Difference

About 15 years ago I was helping May Corporation to switch to e-Commerce (that was their request). It is a company that owned a bunch of big retail chains (Lord and Taylor, Filene's basement, etc.). They thought that it is just about putting a catalog on the web and allowing customers to shop there. I warned them that it is not what e-commerce is about. It is just a connection cable to the high-volume high-power processes that can either burn the company or make it shine like a light bulb.

In order not to be burned by the high-speed requests and the need to determine the whole supply, production, storage, distribution, and dynamic pricing chain (remember the textbook) the company has to respond to these online requests in fractions of a second (without meetings with all parties – as they used to have) - since customers will not wait at the shopping cart longer than a couple of seconds.  This means not just an e-commerce front catalog but changing the whole organization for e-business. Most of the business processes and decisions had to be done by various information systems and be automated (see Amazon as a very good example) to allow for the necessary speed and volume of decisions (topic of next half-week).

Also, such business will compete with their usual store business done in “brick and mortar” fashion (do the search on “brick and mortar organization”). This is why they needed first to get a totally different understanding of what they getting into and how this will change their highly controlled management pyramid (they were tightly controlling ALL the stores from their headquarters). Basically the whole organization had to be redesigned.  This could be done piece by piece with a very carefully designed steps of systems development in a way that all new parts will not make the already functioning automation break (live update).   

As a result, although developing of an online catalog with the shopping cart is a job for one week for an experienced developer, the whole process of putting the company largely under control of information and decision-support systems took years.

How to edit your posts

I saw that some students wanted to edit the posts but the 5 min of allowing corrections expire. My advice here is to just write an improvement to the original post and post it as a reply to the original post with the note on the top saying that this is a correct version. You can make corrections and improvments until the deadline. This will even look better - seen as an additional effort (some of you are already doing it).

Comments on E-Business and Enterprise 2.0

It is important to understand the differences between e-commerce and e-business, where e-commerce is basically a front end of e-business, which does most of the operations that a business should do (but in a more advanced way).

Personally, I am against the use of the term e-business which is rapidly loosing its meaning, that was originally important in order to state the new ways. Now it starts sounding like using “t-business” for the use of telephones in business operations... In my course Technology Enhanced Business (TEB), which I think is a more modern term (as well as on a number conference presentations), I am showing the technologies and methods that should be used in ALL businesses, in most of their processes and subsystems. Unfortunately, there are plenty of businesses that learned too much from business schools teaching old stuff and are trying to implement and maintain old methods. These should die out in modern economic situation.

Enterprise 2.0 has the same part as the description of an e-business would have PLUS an important aspect that goes beyond sharing and employee communications. The growing importance is seen in the ability of Enterprise 2.0 to convert consumers into "prosumers" as producers-consumers by allowing them to participate in the organizational operations; by somewhat (carefully, though) opening the closed walls of modern organizations to buyers, suppliers, and other EXTERNAL collaborators, stakeholders, and just consumers. This allows for faster and more tailored adaptation to the rapidly changing situations well as using extra resources that are not "on the payroll" or have to be managed by dedicated managers within special departments. This aspect might be also interesting for the W3P2 research.

W3P2 Tasks - Copy (some students asked me to repost them on the blog)

I am posting the tasks a bit early so that it will be easier for you to plan the time.
T3.5. Start with reading chapter 5 and its Summary with proper thinking and attention.
Do the self-assessment test at the end of the chapter preparing for the next Tuesday's quiz and for more adequate forum posts.
T3.6: Deadline: 7/30 @ 23:55. Up to 8 points. Do a Web-based research on one of two topics or any form of their mixes: Electronic Business and/or Enterprise 2.0. Choose any one interesting aspect and explore it. Size: min 400 words not counting min 3 used references. Use same criteria for the post as in Research posts last half-week (show the focus of the post and the conclusion of the research on that focus with bold text that was borrowed/modified to show your OWN research contribution). Do ALL the following task parts:
a) Publish your article in the W3 E-Business discussion.
b) Post the same article into your blog.
c) Write meaningful replies, extending or detailing the main post to at least two articles in the W3 E-Business forum.
Note: I will grade this post with 5 points for a normal research, 7 for advanced and 9 points for a very good research.
T3.7. Choice of Apps and Services for productivity and communications.
Deadline: 7/30 @ 23:55. Up to 7 points.
Since you worked with Zoho with the purpose of familiarizing yourself with forms of cloud computing and SaaS - do the research on various cloud computing applications and web apps phenomenon. Find 8 application software services (or Apps) useful and recommended by you for business use or personal productivity/communications enhancement (no games and mere fun applications please!). They should be used right off the Web without the need to download and install on your computer (like Zoho services). Show the link for each service. Advice: once it is done – copy from the forum the links of the most interesting for you apps for the future use (do not need to report this copying part).
Create a table in zoho database (zoho reports) where you describe these services/apps in the following format (see example):

App/service name	Link	Type	What is good
Gmail	gmail.com	communications	Free email, social sharing, phone calls, storage
…	…	…	…

Try not to repeat each other.
Create a post in the Apps and Services forum where you present each of your apps with more explanations of its essence and important features as a numbered list of applications with a public link to the table (where no login should be required – remember W2P2 tasks). The shown Apps/Web services could be for computers, smart phones, or tablets.

Week 3, Task 8 (T3.8) is gradable (up to 8 points with deadline 7/30 11:55pm
For this task you might want to see the video that you started before to the end

http://www.zoho.com/reports/detailed-overview/Video-Demo-Detailed-Overview.html

1. Log into zoho reports ( http://reports.zoho.com/ ) with your account.
2. In the tab on the bottom of the screen in "existing Databases" - click on Featured Samples and then on SUper Store Sales.
3. Once in Super Store Sales database - click on Copy this database on the top menu (might need to scroll to the right)
4. When you see the database copied to your account (you will see extra entities on your left-side nav bar) - poke around, explore it. Pay main attention to the tables (yellow without arrows), views (reddish), reports (blue), and charts (chart icon).
5. Make some structural changes in the sales table including:
a) add a new column and at least one row to the sales table;
b) add a custom formula column with a different from theirs calculation formula, which still should make some business sense along with the column name for it;
c) modify the type of any chart (and what it shows if you want to go for higher quality work) from the database, or create one of your own for higher work quality (although this is not required to consider the task done). Make sure that it works (you might want to watch the video (the link is in task T2.8 point (e)) to the end.
6. Describe the changes that you made in the exact sequence that you used - in the W3 DB discussion. Also, go to the element view (table, chart), click on Publish on the top menu bar and when the drop-down box opens choose the url (make sure it is public, as you did before) that you should copy and paste in the same discussion as an illustration of how your changes look like. Post such links in the same forum to all elements that you created (tables, charts).

Web 2.0 and CI

The best way of learning systems, and IS features in particular, includes the design of a small information system versus just learning buttons for the current version of Excel and Access. Normally, the development of an IS, even of a small size, is quite expensive and/or requires a lot of man/hour investments of highly skilled systems developers. Only organizations with sufficient capital were able to develop and use IS...

The evolution of software as a service (SaaS) or even Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with various types of accompanying web services (and apps) created a possibility of new methods in IS development – assembly of systems out of existing services LEGO – style. This simplicity has led to a dramatic increase in end-user creativity and development capabilities. In this course I want you to learn the most simple but effective ways of such system development for personal and organizational use. Become a one-person army... The basic services we were using so far included free blog development and support services, Zoho spreadsheet and database services and, what is most important, services allowing sharing and collaboration. Already this set of tools, if learned a bit deeper than you've done so far, allows for some basic IS development.

The new, mostly free, and easy to use services that can be incorporated in any custom IS design/redesign led to a new phenomenon: social networks. But the most important effect goes beyond increased activity of emerging social structures. This new unleashed power is studied in Collective Intelligence (CI) dealing with creation of super intelligences out of rather simple processing performed by its parts. Examples include ant societies, various swarm intelligence examples, and... effective teams and organizations. This possibility of acquiring enhanced intelligence is the biggest asset and advantage an organization can dream about nowadays, which comes not as much from the mere infrastructure presence, but its proper architecture and processes in accordance with this new Web 2.0/CI developments.

Web 2.0 technologies released the power and creativity of regular IT users making them producers/consumers (prosumers). These Web 2.0 technologies paired with proper CI organization (where effective collaboration is the key) are the main and the most fascinating developments in modern IS.
Another important event, not to be missed, is rapid growth of cloud computing (see the textbook) that makes Web 2.0 services and accompanying networking even easier.

Blog List

Students can use http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExUrvw3KHg0
as a video instruction for Blog List setting.

Blog addresses of other students can be taken from my blog or from the Blog forum of the past.