Week 8 Discussion Management of Information Systems

Serenity3203

w8_lecture.pptx

Home >Information Systems homework help >Week 8 Discussion Management of Information Systems

Figure 8.8 The components of a web-based retailing operation © Cengage Learning 2015

Several elements are essential to conducting business on the Web, some of them are

An Inquiry interface that connects to database to allow a user to search a catalog of products or services

An order processing application that includes credit-card verification

and an order-fulfillment system that picks, packs, and ships

Business success depends on availability and use of proper software

Elements needed to support B2C commerce

A method of targeting customers

Capture of the customer’s complete experience

Personalizing the service

Shortening the business cycle

Letting customers help themselves

Being proactive and preventing a product from becoming a commodity

Target the customers needing your products and services

The most important effort of marketing is identifying the sites that your audience frequently visits

Consider blogs and podcasting sites for advertisement placement

Capture the Customer’s Total Experience by using cookies to record shopper’s movements within the site

Use CRM software to create consumer profiles

Shopper experience becomes an asset of business, allowing for:

Fine-tuning of the product portfolio

Tailoring of web pages to individual customers

Individual e-mails to shopper offering products of interest

Personalize the service. CRM software and web page customization software can be combined to:

Personalize web pages shown to a customer

Allow the customer to select the type of e-mail content desired

Respect visitor privacy by offering opt-in rather than opt-out

Allow the customer to tailor products to be purchased

Shorten the business cycle. Customers like saving time via web business

Fulfillment is a major challenge for businesses

Activities after a customer places order are important.

Fast shipping is desired because:

It produces higher customer satisfaction

And, the business will collect payments faster

The entire fulfillment process can be outsourced to fulfillment organizations such as:

UPS’s e-Logistics

FedEx’s Supply Chain Services

Let customers help themselves. Self-service is a concept that uses the customer’s ability to determine the timing and services of their consumer needs through a website

Self-service saves labor, and encourages customer loyalty

E-mail messages sent to customers with information about orders and how to track them

Online FAQs allow customers to find answers to common questions

Be proactive and De-commoditize. Prompt e-mail replies expected

Proactive alerts are expected for changes in orders or services, or product recalls

Automatic reordering features are desirable

Businesses must take initiatives to de-commoditize products

A commodity is a product sold at roughly the same price by many vendors (no differentiation)

Addition of features or services prevents a product from becoming a commodity by creating differentiation

E-commerce is every commerce. Web technologies have been highly integrated into the business world

It is difficult to identify which business activities are on the Internet and which are not

The Web has been highly integrated into daily activities of customers.

Commerce and e-commerce generally have the same meaning today

Figure 8.1 HTML and XML code: XML provides a method for describing or classifying data in a webpage

Web business is growing and changing.

Ford Motor Company is a world leader in automobile manufacturing

It employs 197,000 people, in 67 plants around the world

In 2010, Ford targeted a younger, tech-savvy audience in its social marketing strategy of the Ford Fiesta

Response was a positive online attitude An anonymous authors stated that with social media, if you aren’t using, you’re losing.

Let’s discuss a few Web technologies.

Several standards and technologies enable the Web to deliver rich information

HTTP, HTML, XML

File Transfer

Blogs

Wikis

Podcasting

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is used to transfer and download web information

HTTPS (HTTP Secure) is used for confidential data exchange

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a unique address given to each web site

An IP address is a special numeric address

A Domain name is a unique name for a web site, constructed with letters

A Top-level domain (TLD) is the last part of URL

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) helps developers create Web page. It determines look and location of content on a webpage.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) enables creation of various data types. It conveys the meaning or content of data

XHTML is a combination of XML and HTML. It uses opening and closing tags to control the format

HTML5 is the newest version of HTML/XML

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) transmits whole digital files

FTP facilitates downloads from websites

Can transfer most types of files,

And can be used to place files on a server for shared use,

Blog is the contraction of “web log”

Blogs invite visitors to post opinions and art

Blogs focus on a topic or set of topics

Trackback is a tool that notifies bloggers when their posts have been mentioned elsewhere on the web

Blogs are often used by businesses

The importance of blogs to commercial organizations is to find out what blog participants think and say about the organization

Wiki is derived from Hawaiian, meaning “quick.” It is a web application that enables users to add to and edit the contents of web pages

All the software required to edit the web pages is embedded in the pages themselves

Wikipedia is a popular online encyclopedia

Wiki technology is a popular ingredient in groupware , software used for collaboration

A Podcast is a published audio or video recording on the web for download

Podcast are usually on a subscription basis

Some uses of podcast are:

“Time-shifted” broadcast of radio station programs for later listening,

Audio tours in museums,

Lectures in distance learning courses,

Apple’s iTunes products and services,

Variety of content,

And many podcast media files are free

A Massively open online course, a (MOOC), is a new education delivery approach that combines traditional course materials with Web-enabled interactive forums for educators and students.

Instant messaging (IM) is “real-time” messaging that enables chatting online through mobile and traditional devices. IM enable chat room communication within a group

Examples of software applications with expanded communication tools are

Skype,

ooVoo,

, and Wiggio

Some free applications for IM are

AIM: AOL instant Messenger,

Yahoo! Messenger,

MSN Messenger,

And ICQ,

Business uses include sales and support.

A Cookie is a small file that stores information about a web site visitor on the visitor’s computer

Cookies can records the surfer’s ID,

Store a surfer’s preferences,

provide convenience to consumers,

Can be temporary (single session) or permanent,

And have potential for intrusion into surfer privacy

Clickstream tracking tracks a surfer’s clicking activities

Spyware traces and reports online behavior

Proprietary technology is intellectual property of the developer; not free for all to use

Examples are

Local search engines,

Shopping cart applications,

Wish lists,

Video streaming tools,

and tools to analyze and predict web visitor behavior, especially shopper behavior

Decision Support

An organization’s success depends on the decisions made by employees

Computer-based systems are beneficial for:

Large amounts of information

Intensive processing

Types of decision support aids

Decision support systems (DSSs)

Expert systems (ESs)

Applications today may combine both types

Provide single optimal solution or set of solutions

An organization’s success depends on the decisions made by employees

Computer-based systems are beneficial for:

Large amounts of information

Intensive processing

Types of decision support aids

Decision support systems (DSSs)

Expert systems (ESs)

Applications today may combine both types

Provide single optimal solution or set of s

Decision support modules today may be part of larger enterprise applications

Also called business analysis tools or business intelligence applications

Designed to streamline the decision-making process

Data warehouses and online processing (OLAP) technologies have enhanced the ability to use data for decision making

A decision must be made whenever more than one possible action is available

It can be difficult to make decisions when many reasonable alternatives are present

In business, there may be dozens, hundreds, or even millions of different courses of actions available to achieve a desired result

Decision making is a three-phase process

Intelligence phase: collect facts, beliefs, and ideas

Design phase: design the method for considering the collected data, to reduce the alternatives to a manageable number

Choice phase: select an alternative from the remaining choices

Businesses collect data internally and externally

A model is an abstraction of reality, such as:

Tabletop representations of buildings

Maps: represent a geographical area

Mathematical equations representing relationships among variables

Managers either choose universal models or design their own models

A structured problem is one in which an optimal solution can be reached through a single set of steps

An Algorithm is a sequence of steps to complete a task

Parameters are categories of data that are considered in an algorithm

Most mathematical and physical problems are structured, but many business problems are not

An Unstructured problem is one for which there is no algorithm that leads to an optimal solution

May not be enough information

May be a large number of potential factors

Unstructuredness is closely related to uncertainty

Examples of unstructured problems

Weather prediction

Stock market prediction

A Semistructured problem is one that is neither fully structured nor totally unstructured

Professionals encounter semistructured problems almost daily in many different industries

The goal is to choose the one alternative that will bring about the best outcome

Challenges of Global Information Systems

Global information systems face challenges such as:

Technological barriers

Regulations and tariffs

Electronic payment mechanisms

Different languages and cultures

Economic and political considerations

Different measurement and notation standards

Legal barriers

Different time zones

Global information systems face challenges such as:

Technological barriers

Regulations and tariffs

Electronic payment mechanisms

Different languages and cultures

Economic and political considerations

Different measurement and notation standards

Legal barriers

Different time zones

Technological Challenges

Not all countries have adequate information technology infrastructure to allow companies to build an international IS

Broadband communication lines are needed to support today’s graphics-rich webpages

Companies can offer two versions of their websites to compensate for slower bandwidth

Language is another technological challenge

Eight-bit byte code is not sufficient for languages with large character sets

Unicode allows for 65,536 characters

Must coordinate with databases and applications

Telephone number and postal code formats are different in different countries

Regulations and Tarrifs

Countries have different import regulations and tariffs

Executives may be reluctant because of hassles of learning the laws, taxes, tariffs, and regulations of other countries

Companies must comply with the laws of destination countries

NextLinx software helps importers and exporters using web commerce

Differences in Payment Mechanisms

Easy payment for online purchases is expected

Credit cards are the preferred payment method in North America

Not all countries have adopted this preference

High level of stolen credit cards in Eastern Europe

Europeans prefer debit cards

Most Japanese reluctant to use credit cards

Language Differences

International parties must agree on a common language for communication

Data might not be transmittable internationally in real time because it must first be translated

English is considered the de facto international language

Companies in the forefront of web-based e-commerce translate their original websites into local languages

Cultural Differences

People from different countries vary in their:

Tastes

Gestures

Preferred colors

Treatment of people of certain gender or age

Attitudes about work

Opinions about ethical issues

Conservative groups in other countries may dislike the “Americanization” of their cultures

Web designers must be sensitive to cultural differences

Figure 11.1 Potential applications of data mining © Cengage Learning 2015

A data warehouse is a large database containing historical transactions and other data

Data warehouses are useless without software tools to process the data into meaningful information

Business intelligence (BI) is information gleaned with information analysis tools

Also called business analytics

Data mining is a the process of selecting, exploring, and modeling large amounts of data

Data mining is used to discover relationships that can support decision making

Data-mining tools may use complex statistical analysis applications

Data-mining queries are more complex than traditional queries

Data-warehousing techniques and data-mining tools facilitate the prediction of future outcomes

The objectives of data mining are:

Sequence or path analysis, which is finding patterns where one event leads to another

Classification which is finding whether certain facts fall into predefined groups

Clustering which is, finding groups of related facts not previously known

And Forecasting which is discovering patterns that can lead to reasonable predictions

Data mining techniques are applied to various fields, including marketing, fraud detection, and targeted marketing to individuals

Data mining techniques are used in predicting customer behavior

Banking uses data mining to help find profitable customers, detect patterns of fraud, and predict bankruptcies

Mobile phone services vendors use data mining techniques to help determine factors that affect customer loyalty

Customer loyalty programs ensure a steady flow of customer data into data warehouses

Many industries utilize loyalty programs, e.g., frequent-flier programs and consumer clubs

Huge amounts of data about customers is amassed

UPS’ Customer Intelligence Group analyzes customer behavior and predicts customer defections so that a salesperson can intervene to resolve problems

Data mining techniques are used in identifying profitable customer groups

Financial institutions dismiss high-risk customers

Companies attempt to define narrow groups of potentially profitable customers

Data mining utilize loyalty programs

Companies develop customized email newsletters targeted to individual customers

Targeted special offers and partner specials are tailored to each customer

Figure 12.1 The steps associated with information systems planning © Cengage Learning 2015

Enterprise ISs are gaining in popularity

IS resource investment considerations

Require a substantial investment

Carry a high risk in implementation

Successful integration of the system is vital

Must align IT strategies with the overall organization strategies

Careful planning of an IS implementation is necessary

Key steps in IT planning

Create a corporate and IT mission statement

Articulate the vision for IT within the organization

Create IT strategic and tactical plans

Create a plan for operations to achieve the mission and vision

Create a budget to ensure that resources are available to achieve the mission and vision

Mission statement: communicates the most important overarching goal of organization

Includes how the goals will be achieved

IT mission statement: describes the role of IT in the organization

Should be compatible with the organizational mission statement

Includes the ideal combination of hardware, software, and networking to support the mission

CIO develops a strategic plan for implementation of IT in the organization

Addresses what technology will be used by employees, customers, and suppliers

Goals in the plan are broken down into objectives, such as:

Resources to be acquired or developed

Timetables for acquiring and implementing resources

Training

Objectives are broken down to operational details

IT planning is similar to planning of other resource acquisitions

Growing proportion of IT funds is spent on software in recent years

More purchasing and adapting of software

Less developing in-house software

Goals of Information Security

Protecting IT resources is a primary concern

Securing corporate ISs is becoming increasingly challenging

Major goals of information security

Reduce the risk of systems ceasing operation

Maintain information confidentiality

Ensure the integrity and reliability of data resources

Ensure the uninterrupted availability of resources

Ensure compliance with policies and laws

Protecting IT resources is a primary concern

Securing corporate ISs is becoming increasingly challenging

Major goals of information security are to

Reduce the risk of systems ceasing operation,

Maintain information confidentiality,

Ensure the integrity and reliability of data resources,

Ensure the uninterrupted availability of resources,

And Ensure compliance with policies and laws

Laws passed by U.S. Congress setting standards for protecting privacy

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)

Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX)

CIA triad: foundational concepts of information systems security

Confidentiality

Integrity

Availability

Risks associated with cloud computing and data storage

Downtime: the period of time during which an IS is not available

$26 billion lost annually in the U.S. due to downtime

Costs of downtime vary depending on industry, the size of the company, and other factors

There are also risk to hardware.

The #1 cause of system downtime is hardware failure

Major causes of hardware damage

Natural disasters

Fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and lightning

Blackouts and brownouts

Blackout: total loss of electricity

Brownout: partial loss of electricity

Uninterruptible power supply (UPS): backup power for a short time

Major causes of hardware damage

Vandalism

Deliberate destruction

Deliberate alteration or destruction is often done as a prank, but has a high cost

Online vandal’s target may be a company’s website

Hacking: unauthorized access

Honeytoken: a bogus record in a networked database used to combat hackers

Honeypot: a server containing a mirrored copy of a database or a bogus database

Educates security officers about vulnerable points

Virus: spreads from computer to computer

Worm: spreads in a network without human intervention

Antivirus software: protects against viruses

Trojan horse: a virus disguised as legitimate software

Logic bomb: software that is programmed to cause damage at a specific time

Unintentional, non-malicious damage can be caused by:

Poor training

Lack of adherence to backup procedures

Unauthorized downloading and installation of software may cause damage

Human error

There are risks to online operations. Many hackers try daily to interrupt online businesses

Some types of attacks

Unauthorized access

Data theft

Defacing of webpages

Denial of service

Hijacking computers

Denial of service (DoS): an attacker launches a large number of information requests

Slows down legitimate traffic to site

Distributed denial of service (DDoS): an attacker launches a DoS attack from multiple computers

Usually launched from hijacked personal computers called “zombies”

There is no definitive cure for this

A site can filter illegitimate traffic

Computer Hijacking is using some or all of a computer’s resources without the consent of its owner

Often done for making a DDoS attack

Done by installing a software bot on the computer

Main purpose of hijacking is usually to send spam

Bots are planted by exploiting security holes in operating systems and communications software

A bot usually installs e-mail forwarding software

Security Measures

Organizations can protect against attacks using various approaches, including:

Firewalls

Authentication

Encryption

Digital signatures

Digital certificates

Organizations can take security measures to protect against attacks using various approaches, including:

Firewalls

Authentication

Encryption

Digital signatures

And Digital certificates

Firewall: hardware and software that blocks access to computing resources

The best defense against unauthorized access over the Internet

Firewalls are now routinely integrated into routers

DMZ: demilitarized zone approach

One end of the network is connected to the trusted network, and the other end to the Internet

Connection is established using a proxy server

Proxy server: “represents” another server for all information requests from resources inside the trusted network

Can also be placed between the Internet and the trusted network when there is no DMZ

Authentication: the process of ensuring that you are who you say you are

Encryption: coding a message into an unreadable form

Messages are encrypted and authenticated to ensure security

Important when communicating confidential information, e.g., financial and medical records

A message may be text, image, sound, or other digital information

Encryption programs scramble the transmitted information

Plaintext is the original message

Ciphertext is the encoded message

Encryption uses a mathematical algorithm and a key

A Key is a unique combination of bits that will decipher the ciphertext

Public-key encryption uses two keys, one public and one private

Symmetric encryption is when the sender and the recipient use the same key

Asymmetric encryption is when both a public and a private key are used

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a protocol for transactions on the Web that uses a combination of public key and symmetric key encryption

HTTPS is a the secure version of HTTP

A Digital signature is a means to authenticate online messages; implemented with public keys

A Message digest is unique fingerprint of file

Digital certificates are computer files that associate one’s identity with one’s public key

Issued by certificate authority

Certificate authority (CA) is a trusted third party

A digital certificate contains its holder’s name, a serial number, its expiration dates, and a copy of holder’s public key

Also contains the digital signature of the CA

The downside of security measures are:

For Single sign-on (SSO) a user must enter his or her name/password only once

Single sign-on saves employees time

Encryption slows down communication

Every message must be encrypted and then decrypted

IT specialists must clearly explain the implications of security measures to upper management

Recovery Measures

Security measures may reduce mishaps, but no one can control all disasters

Preparation for uncontrolled disasters requires that recovery measures are in place

Redundancy may be used

Very expensive, especially in distributed systems

Other measures must be taken

Security measures may reduce mishaps, but no one can control all disasters

Recovery measures are preparation for uncontrolled disasters that require recovery of data and information.

Redundancy may be used

It is Very expensive, especially in distributed systems

Other measures must be taken

A Business recovery plan is a detailed plan about what should be done and by whom if critical systems go down

Also called a disaster recovery plan, business resumption plan, or business continuity plan

To develop a business recovery plan

Obtain management’s commitment to the plan

Establish a planning committee

Perform risk assessment and impact analysis

Prioritize recovery needs

Mission-critical applications: those without which the business cannot conduct operations

Select a recovery plan

Select vendors

Develop and implement the plan

Test the plan

Continually test and evaluate

Can outsource recovery plans to firms that specialize in disaster recover planning

Hot sites are alternative sites that a business can use when a disaster occurs

Backup sites provide desks, computer systems, and Internet links

Companies that implement hot sites

IBM

Hewlett-Packard

SunGard Availability Services