Q. No. 1. Describe the kinds of data being analyzed by the companies in the case study?
Big data analyzation was one of the most difficult tasks before there were software that could not only analyze but also providing the best solution. In todays context data analyzation is simpler and easier with the evolution in technology. Many organizations and firms had used big data analyzation software, and some have had fair amount of success because of the use of data analyzation.
British Library
British library website performs over 6 billion searches on its web and is responsible for preserving websites that are of valuable or no longer exist. Big data was the issue here so British library partnered with IBM and introduces IBM Big sheets; which is an Insight engine that helps to extract, annotate and visually analyze large amount of data quickly without no time and accurately and derive it via web. IBM big sheets allows user to work with built in sheets editor, add\delete column, specify formula on its own to process out the data. British Library is adapting with IBM Big sheets to have a clear data on all the browsers who have entered the British library page and secure their searches and shows the related searches to the browser.
New York city police department
Real time crime center data warehouse contain millions of data points stored in its ware house and for this purpose New York police department had to collaborate their work with IBM to create the warehouse which contains information about the criminals offences, criminal pictures, their past and present location of where they live etc. are displayed with just in a click of a button, which could help the police with the enquiries and their work to convey in a systemic manner. It basically is the data stored in a safe location and using it in a manner which would help the community for the betterment.
Vestas
It is one of the world’s largest wind energy company which installs wind turbine to produce electricity and use it in their products. With the moto go greener vestas also worked with IBM and thus comes IBM Infosphere which has the collected data of all the turbines that are located in the field along with the necessary information about the placement of the turbines which in turn can relay information about the place suitable for the turbine to install and the size of the turbine that is more efficient and effective for optimal utilization of it products. The software even helped the company to reduce the surface area of the turbines from 27*27 kilometers to 10*10 meters.
Q. No. 2. List and describe the business intelligence technologies described in this case.
IBM Big sheets
This intelligence technology helps the organization with handling big data which is built atop the Hadoop framework, which helps in process of data quickly and efficiently. Collaboration of IBM with the British library who had a pretty hard time handling big data lead to the introduction of IBM Big sheets, It is basically a web based spread sheet like interface that enables the user to handle a large amount of data and is a part of IBM infosphere big insight software. Its built-in commands help the interface with the user very easy and efficient and displays the result in pie chart or in a summary view.
Real time crime center data
Real time crime center data is the collaborative work of New York police department and IBM which stores a very large amount of data points on city crime and criminals. It contains more than 120 million criminal complaints, 31 million national crime records and 33 billion public records. Because of this technology NYPD can obtain information on any criminal records with a click of a button and has a very important role in dismembering any terrorist activities linked with those criminals associated with it. Data stored in the ware house can easily be accessible to the police department with the associate’s pictures, where they used to live or where they are living currently in the map pin pointed. This had helped NYPD to reduce the crime rate and bring those responsible for the crime to justice.
IBM Infosphere Big Insight
Infosphere big insight is a set of software tools for analyzing big data and visualization and is powered by Apache Hadoop. Vestas whose moto is go greener adopted this service to go even greener. It is one of the largest wind energy company with over 4300 wind turbine companies across 66 countries. The software helps the company with the suggestion about placing the wind turbine in the place where they could get its optimum output, with the collaboration the organization could reduce the grid pattern of their wind turbine from 27*27 kilometer down to 3*3 kilometer in the area of turbine. Vestas wind library consist of 2.8 petabytes of data and includes 178parameters such as biometric pressure, humidity, temperature etc.
Q. No. 3. Are there any disadvantages to mining customer data? Explain your answer.
As every coin has two sides data mining also has its advantages and disadvantages. It is used for marketing/retail purpose, finance/banking, manufacturing etc. storing a vast amount of customer data has following disadvantages.
Privacy
The term privacy means a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people and data mining could take away the personal privacy with the boom in the internet and social media. People are concerned about the personal information collected by the organizations which could be used in un ethical way which could potentially cause a lot of troubles
Security
Security is a big issue as well. Business own information about its employee and customers including social security number, birthdays, payroll etc. There has been a lot of cases in which hackers have hacked access and stole a vast amount of data of customers from the big companies which raises a serious question of how the data is handled in those companies.
Misuse of information/ inaccurate information
All the information collected for the purpose of data mining could exploit the customers and can easily persuade the customers in the point of view of a business. It is to say that the data collected could be used unethically where a business could take benefit of the customer.
4. How do you feel about airlines mining your in-flight data? Is this any different from companies mining your credit card purchases or web surfing?
In my opinion airlines mining the in-flight data does not violate the privacy rights of the customer involved with it. It is a way by which the airlines are trying to make their service more effective towards the customer which helps them to improve inflight delivery services and flying experiences. I believe that it is not any different from companies mining the credit card purchases or web surfing. First and for most all the data handling is concerned for what purpose that it is being done meaning unethical handling. However, credit card purchases data mining is considered very sensitive and violation of privacy rights depending on the perspective with which it is viewed.
Part 2
Identify the key software applications used by the tea collection.
The video explains about the software applications that a tea collection company are using through out their manufacturing purposes to the selling prospective. Tea collection are using design software to imprint the design on the dress and that’s where the designs comes to life in the form of the printed dress. The key and the foremost application used by tea collection is geo mapping software which helps them to target new prospects and find regions that are not over saturated with the children’s clothing. Essentially, they are using a geographical data mapping software which collects data on where the tea collection had their stores and what location should the company be persuading for the new target market. tea collection has also created a back-end tool for their retailers that makes it easier to make order over the web.
How does the geo mapping software help the company grow? Explain how sales reps use the result of the geo-mapping system.
Geo-mapping software is a geographical data mapping software which is used by tea collection company to first identify the location where the tea collection store would be a perfect fit to open along with all the other stores that are located near the targeted area. The result is shown in the form of red and yellow dots and the green area signifies that it is the area where sales reps should be persuading. This helps them to find the area which are not populated with the children’s ware stores and reduce the chances of getting the stores closed. The result is shown in software as the Realtime map along with the red blue and yellow dots where the yellow dots and the green area shows that the area is perfect for opening the new tea collection store.
What is the main technology challenge identified in the video? How would you suggest this challenge should be addressed?
The biggest challenge with technology is integration so that you have multiple systems a d when they don’t integrate automatically then there is going to be a big problem and have to use people to fulfill the gap and connection and it could take a lot of time create a lot of mistakes. I suggest this challenge should be addressed as a opportunity to grow and add the amount of investment on technology where the perfect software could be produced with an upgrade.
Do you believe this company can continue to grow rapidly with the existing software and hardware they have demonstrated in this video? why or why not?
The tea collection was established in 2002 by two felame enterprenure and the company is profitable growing at more than 50% a year and 1% of sales is spent on IT
Section 2
Part 1
What business benefits do cloud computing services provide? What problems do they solve?
Basically cloud computing is a computing modle which provides the service of computing,storing and sharing resources with those in need over the internet and is a solution for many business and organizations. Business benefits that cloud computing could provide are as follows:
• It could help the business organization to reduce its operating cost since the same amount of money and energy is consumed to both operating and cooling the servers to prevent its malfunctions
• Business can gain a large amount of storage data without the hassle over the internet and can create a huge customer database which could work as a benefit to the business.
Problems could computing could solve are as follow:
• Power consumption the growing environmental calamity could be prevented with the use of cloud computing.
• Companies could have flexible storage and computing processes and data management and required
What are the dis advantages of cloud computing?
The disadvantages of cloud computing are as follow:
Downtime and limited control
As cloud service is used the organization has to be dependent to the server who provides the service and cannot have access if there is no internet connection. There is a limited control transferred over to the customer since they only control and manage the application, data and service operated apart from that the control is very minimal.
Security
One of the growing issues over nowadays is the security of a personal and there have been several rules and regulations to set them in place. Upon using the cloud service everything is shared with the service provider so the important documents and files. Hacking of the files is not likely in the near future as the service provider guarantees but the cost of getting hacked is very devastating.
Vendor lock in
Switching between cloud services is the problem that is yet to be resolved properly so the user might get stuck migrating the services from one vendor to another. Hosting and integrating cloud application on different types of platform may creates some support issue and interruption since the platform might be different.
How do the concept of capacity planning, scalability, and TCO apply to this case? Apply these concepts both to amazon and to the subscriber of its services.
Capacity planning is defined as the process of predicting when a computer hardware system becomes saturated to ensure that adequate computing resources are available for work of different priorities and that the firm has enough computing power for its current and future needs. scalability, which is defined as the ability of a computer, product, or system to expand to serve a large number of users without breaking down. Scalability is ability of a system, network or process to handle a growing amount of work in capable manner orbits ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. Total Cost Ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyer and owners determine the direct and indirect cost of a product or system.
Amazon is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company which sells and distributes its products via internet and delivers it through out the world. Basically, amazon’s page consist of list of products offered, products related to similar searches etc. It should plan ahead for the future about the consumption of computing power for Amazon retail service and provide accordingly. The services provided by amazon must be scalable to the customer as they claim to do so in their website.
What kinds of business are most likely to benefit from using cloud computing? Why?
Large enterprises like car dealers, wholesaler, online business etc. are most likely to benefit from cloud computing because of the following reasons:
Prevention of data loss
Data loss can be prevented since the main server is shared with all the document so if one of the servers is down than the user can start and can look for the data again and find them. Helps secure the data for any organization example the information of the car dealership who sells car to its customer can be backed up in cloud computing so that it can be easily accessed in the future.
Online business
Online business could hugely benefit form cloud computing because the primary benefit could be the web server space. The cost of set up and running the website is much higher than switching to the cloud computing along with the traffic over the web.
Collaborative business
In order to complete a large collaborative project, there should be collaboration and understanding of everyone involved and applications running on cloud-based software makes the process easy and convenient
Part 2
What were the business challenges facing Maruti Suzuki management prior to adapting the oracle suite?
The challenges faced by Maruti Suzuki management prior to adapting the oracle suite are as follows:
Controls
Maruti Suzuki management had control issues in some of their process thus to improve control over their huge database oracle suite was implemented and showed the result quite astonishingly and started standardized practices right across the enterprise in making data immediately available online without the need of batch processing
Better turnaround time
Maruti Suzuki has added the extra power of oracle’s Hyperion enterprise to provide complete drill-down with multiple views of data as well as significantly reduce turnaround time in producing consolidated accounts.
What advantages does Maruti Suzuki derive from working with a single vendor, Oracle? What are the possible risks of working with a single vendor?
Working with a single vendor has its merits as they are the two working for each other their service is more efficient and less time consuming and with the most optimal result. All the services are provided by a single company, so they know each other well and are willing to be time efficient along with the consulting with most of the aspects faced by the organization. Maruti Suzuki also got their managers trained with oracle for their managers to work in a most efficient way. The possible risks that working with a single vendor can be if the vendor goes bankrupt then the other party is to suffer very harshly since they don’t have any other source where they could get the material needed. Vender can decide to choose whatever price they want to charge for their products and services and the other party has no option and pay. This could eventually lead to the collops of the company.
What were the important business factors which management used to evaluate Oracle’s database offerings?
The business factors which management used to evaluate oracle’s database offerings are better control over the huge database/standardized practice rights and better turnaround time which could provide the management drawdown with multiple views of data, they could show them immediate benefit. They needed a software which would work with the legacy system and allow them with multiple entries and retrieves of the data which made the control over data easy and accessible.
Why was it important that a vendor’s products be able to integrate with legacy systems?
Legacy systems are the systems that are fairly old technology and those are from very past times. And yet those are still in use and are of intrigue part of the organization. If the vendors product was not reliable with legacy systems then the whole system needed to be replaced and the replacement for those could be very costly money wise and data wise since data might not transfer in different systems. Not only that the organozation had to train the employee with the new system which is time consuming and costly at the same time.
What are the business benefits reported by management to using the Oracle suite of products?
The business benefits reported by management to using oracle suite of products are as follows:
• It brought flexibility within human resources department in Maruti Suzuki
• It standardized practices rights
• It reduced turnaround time
• It provided better control ability and consolidation
• Easy access of data throughout the organization
Section 3
Part 1
Should managers monitor employee e?mail and Internet usage? Why or why not?
Yes, I think managers should monitor employee email and internet usage because the performance of the company is solely dependent on the employee working under it and if the employee is indulging in the interne then the performance is obviously going to be poor so in my opinion managers should monito employee email and internet usage in work place. American management association survey of 304 U.S companies of all sizes found that 66 percent of these companies monitor employee email messages and web connection. According to Basex, a New York city business research company the distraction that the employee causes with surfing the net at work place can amount to 28 percent of the average US workers day and can result up to $ 650 billion in loss in productivity. So in over all monitoring employees email and internet usage at work cam lead to a productive and effective workforce within an organization.
Describe an effective e?mail and Web use policy for a company.
