Week 5 assignment
bemp1130
wk5ch5.docxWeek5 ch 5 Business Driven Information Systems, Ch. 5.1: MIS Infrastructures
Read Ch. 5.1 of Business Driven Information Systems: MIS Infrastructures.
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ection 5.1 |
MIS Infrastructures |
LEARNING OUTCOMES
5.1Explain MIS infrastructure and its three primary types.
5.2Identify the three primary areas associated with an information MIS infrastructure.
5.3Describe the characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure.
THE BUSINESS BENEFITS OF A SOLID MIS INFRASTRUCTURE
LO 5.1: Explain MIS infrastructure and its three primary types.
Management information systems have played a significant role in business strategies, affected business decisions and processes, and even changed the way companies operate. What is the foundation supporting all of these systems that enable business growth, operations, and profits? What supports the volume and complexity of today’s user and application requirements? What protects systems from failures and crashes? It is the MIS infrastructure , which includes the plans for how a firm will build, deploy, use, and share its data, processes, and MIS assets. A solid MIS infrastructure can reduce costs, improve productivity, optimize business operations, generate growth, and increase profitability.
Briefly defined, hardware consists of the physical devices associated with a computer system, and software is the set of instructions the hardware executes to carry out specific tasks. In today’s business environment, most hardware and software is run via a network. A network is a communications system created by linking two or more devices and establishing a standard methodology in which they can communicate. As more companies need to share more information, the network takes on greater importance in the infrastructure. Most companies use a specific form of network infrastructure called a client and server network. A client is a computer designed to request information from a server. A server is a computer dedicated to providing information in response to requests. A good way to understand this is when someone uses a web browser (this would be the client) to access a website (this would be a server that would respond with the web page being requested by the client). Anyone not familiar with the basics of hardware, software, or networks should review Appendix A, “Hardware and Software Basics,” and Appendix B, “Networks and Telecommunications,” for more information.
In the physical world, a detailed blueprint would show how public utilities, such as water, electricity, and gas, support the foundation of a building. MIS infrastructure is similar because it shows in detail how the hardware, software, and network connectivity support the firm’s processes. Every company, regardless of size, relies on some form of MIS infrastructure, whether it is a few networked personal computers sharing an Excel file or a large multinational company with thousands of employees interconnected around the world.
An MIS infrastructure is dynamic; it continually changes as the business needs change. Each time a new form of Internet-enabled device, such as an iPhone or BlackBerry, is created and made available to the public, a firm’s MIS infrastructure must be revised to support the device. This moves beyond just innovations in hardware to include new types of software and network connectivity. An enterprise architect is a person grounded in technology, fluent in business, and able to provide the important bridge between MIS and the business. Firms employ enterprise architects to help manage change and dynamically update MIS infrastructure. Figure 5.2 displays the three primary areas on which enterprise architects focus when maintaining a firm’s MIS infrastructure.
Supporting operations: Information MIS infrastructure identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured.
Supporting change: Agile MIS Infrastructure includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organization’s goals.
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FIGURE 5.2
MIS Infrastructures
Supporting the environment: Sustainable MIS infrastructure identifies ways that a company can grow in terms of computing resources while simultaneously becoming less dependent on hardware and energy consumption.
SUPPORTING OPERATIONS: INFORMATION MIS INFRASTRUCTURE
LO 5.2: Identify the three primary areas associated with an information MIS infrastructure.
Imagine taking a quick trip to the printer on the other side of the room, and when you turn around you find that your laptop has been stolen. How painful would you find this experience? What types of information would you lose? How much time would it take you to recover all of that information? A few things you might lose include music, movies, emails, assignments, saved passwords, not to mention that all-important 40-page paper that took you more than a month to complete. If this sounds painful then you want to pay particular attention to this section and learn how to eliminate this pain.
An information MIS infrastructure identifies where and how important information is maintained and secured. An information infrastructure supports day-to-day business operations and plans for emergencies such as power outages, floods, earthquakes, malicious attacks via the Internet, theft, and security breaches to name just a few. Managers must take every precaution to make sure their systems are operational and protected around the clock every day of the year. Losing a laptop or experiencing bad weather in one part of the country simply cannot take down systems required to operate core business processes. In the past, someone stealing company information would have to carry out boxes upon boxes of paper. Today, as data storage technologies grow in capabilities while shrinking in size, a person can simply walk out the front door of the building with the company’s data files stored on a thumb drive or external hard drive. Today’s managers must act responsibly to protect one of their most valued assets, information. To support continuous business operations, an information infrastructure provides three primary elements:
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FIGURE 5.3
Areas of Support Provided by Information Infrastructure
Backup and recovery plan
Disaster recovery plan
Business continuity plan (see Figure 5.3)
Backup and Recovery Plan
Each year businesses lose time and money because of system crashes and failures. One way to minimize the damage of a system crash is to have a backup and recovery strategy in place. A backup is an exact copy of a system’s information. Recovery is the ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash or failure that includes restoring the information backup. Many types of backup and recovery media are available, including maintaining an identical replica or redundant copy of the storage server, external hard drives, thumb drives, and even DVDs. The primary differences between them are speed and cost.
Fault tolerance is the ability for a system to respond to unexpected failures or system crashes as the backup system immediately and automatically takes over with no loss of service. For example, fault tolerance enables a business to support continuous business operations if there is a power failure or flood. Fault tolerance is an expensive form of backup, and only mission-critical applications and operations use it. Failover , a specific type of fault tolerance, occurs when a redundant storage server offers an exact replica of the real-time data, and if the primary server crashes, the users are automatically directed to the secondary server or backup server. This is a high-speed and high-cost method of backup and recovery. Failback occurs when the primary machine recovers and resumes operations, taking over from the secondary server.
Using DVDs or thumb drives to store your data offers a low-speed and low-cost backup method. It is a good business practice to back up data at least once a week using a low-cost method. This will alleviate the pain of having your laptop stolen or your system crash because you will still have access to your data, and it will only be a few days old.
Deciding how often to back up information and what media to use is a critical decision. Companies should choose a backup and recovery strategy in line with their goals and operational needs. If the company deals with large volumes of critical information, it will require daily, perhaps hourly, backups to storage servers. If it relies on small amounts of noncritical information, then it might require only weekly backups to external hard drives or thumb drives. A company that backs up on a weekly basis is taking the risk that, if a system crash occurs, it could lose a week’s worth of work. If this risk is acceptable, a weekly backup strategy will work. If it is unacceptable, the company needs more frequent backup.
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APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE
BUSINESS DRIVEN START-UP
Creating Your BCP Plan
Business disruption costs money. In the event of a disaster or emergency, you will not only lose revenue, you will also incur additional expenses. If you are expecting your insurance to cover your losses, be careful—there are many losses your insurance will not cover such as lost sales, lost business intelligence, and lost customers. To mitigate the risks of a catastrophe, you will want to create a detailed business continuity plan. A business continuity plan (BCP) is not only a good idea but also one of the least expensive plans a company can develop. A BCP will detail how employees will contact each other and continue to keep operations functioning in the event of a disaster or emergency such as a fire or flood. Regrettably, many companies never take the time to develop such a plan until it is too late.
Research the web for sample BCP plans for a small business or a start-up. In a group, create a BCP for a start-up of your choice. Be sure to think of such things as data storage, data access, transaction processing, employee safety, and customer communications.
Disaster Recovery Plan
Disasters such as power outages, fires, floods, hurricanes, and even malicious activities such as hackers and viruses strike companies every day. Disasters can have the following effects on companies and their business operations.
Disrupting communications: Most companies depend on voice and data communications for daily operational needs. Widespread communications outages, from either direct damage to the infrastructure or sudden spikes in usage related to an outside disaster, can be as devastating to some firms as shutting down the whole business.
Damaging physical infrastructures: Fire and flood can directly damage buildings, equipment, and systems, making structures unsafe and systems unusable. Law enforcement officers and firefighters may prohibit business professionals from entering a building, thereby restricting access to retrieve documents or equipment.
Halting transportation: Disasters such as floods and hurricanes can have a deep effect on transportation. Disruption to major highways, roads, bridges, railroads, and airports can prevent business professionals from reporting to work or going home, slow the delivery of supplies, and stop the shipment of products.
Blocking utilities: Public utilities, such as the supply of electric power, water, and natural gas, can be interrupted for hours or days even in incidents that cause no direct damage to the physical infrastructure. Buildings are often uninhabitable and systems unable to function without public utilities.
These effects can devastate companies by causing them to cease operations for hours, days, or longer and risk losing customers whom they cannot then supply. Therefore, to combat these disasters, a company can create a disaster recovery plan , which is a detailed process for recovering information or a system in the event of a catastrophic disaster. This plan includes such factors as which files and systems need to have backups and their corresponding frequency and methods along with the strategic location of the storage in a separate physical site that is geographically dispersed. A company might strategically maintain operations in New York and San Francisco, ensuring that a natural disaster would not have an impact on both locations. A disaster recovery plan also foresees the possibility that not only the computer equipment but also the building where employees work may be destroyed. A hot site is a separate and fully equipped facility where the company can move immediately after a disaster and resume business. A cold site is a separate facility that does not have any computer equipment but is a place where employees can move after a disaster. A warm site is a separate facility with computer equipment that requires installation and configuration. Figure 5.4 outlines these resources that support disaster recovery.
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FIGURE 5.4
Sites to Support Disaster Recovery
A disaster recovery plan usually has a disaster recovery cost curve to support it. A disaster recovery cost curve charts (1) the cost to the company of the unavailability of information and technology and (2) the cost to the company of recovering from a disaster over time. Figure 5.5 displays a disaster recovery cost curve and shows that the best recovery plan in terms of cost and time is where the two lines intersect. Creating such a curve is no small task. Managers must consider the cost of losing information and technology within each department or functional area and across the whole company. During the first few hours of a disaster, those costs may be low, but they rise over time. With those costs in hand, a company must then determine the costs of recovery. Figure 5.6 displays TechTarget’s disaster recovery strategies for business.
On April 18, 1906, San Francisco was rocked by an earthquake that destroyed large sections of the city and claimed the lives of more than 3,000 inhabitants. More than a century later, a rebuilt and more durable San Francisco serves as a central location for major MIS corporations as well as a major world financial center. Managers of these corporations are well aware of the potential disasters that exist along the San Andreas Fault and actively update their business continuity plans anticipating such issues as earthquakes and floods. The Union Bank of California is located in the heart of downtown San Francisco and maintains a highly detailed and well-developed business continuity plan. The company employs hundreds of business professionals scattered around the world that coordinate plans for addressing the potential loss of a facility, business professionals, or critical systems so that the company can continue to operate if a disaster happens. Its disaster recovery plan includes hot sites where staff can walk in and start working exactly as if they were in their normal location. It would be a matter of minutes, not hours, for the Union Bank of California to be up and running again in the event of a disaster.2
FIGURE 5.5
Disaster Recovery Cost Curve
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FIGURE 5.6
TechTarget’s Disaster Recovery Strategies
Business Continuity Plan
An emergency is a sudden, unexpected event requiring immediate action due to potential threat to health and safety, the environment, or property. Emergency preparedness ensures that a company is ready to respond to an emergency in an organized, timely, and effective manner. Natural disasters and terrorist attacks are on the minds of business professionals who take safeguarding their information assets seriously. Disaster recovery plans typically focus on systems and data, ignoring cross-functional and intraorganizational business processes that can be destroyed during an emergency. For this reason many companies are turning to a more comprehensive and all-encompassing emergency preparedness plan known as business continuity planning (BCP) , which details how a company recovers and restores critical business operations and systems after a disaster or extended disruption. BCP includes such factors as identifying critical systems, business processes, departments, and the maximum amount of time the business can continue to operate without functioning systems (see Figure 5.7). BCP contains disaster recovery plans along with many additional plans, including prioritizing business impact analysis, emergency notification plans, and technology recovery strategies.
Business Impact Analysis A business impact analysis identifies all critical business functions and the effect that a specific disaster may have on them. A business impact analysis is primarily used to ensure that a company has made the right decisions about the order of recovery priorities and strategies. For example, should the accounting department have its systems up and running before the sales and marketing departments? Will email be the first system for recovery to ensure that employees can communicate with each other and outside stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, and partners? The business impact analysis is a key part of BCP because it details the order in which functional areas should be restored, ensuring that the most critical are focused on first.
Emergency Notification Services A business continuity plan typically includes an emergency notification service , that is, an infrastructure built for notifying people in the event of an emergency. Radio stations’ occasional tests of the national Emergency Alert System are an example of a very large-scale emergency notification system. A firm will implement an emergency notification service to warn employees of unexpected events and provide them with instructions about how to handle the situation. Emergency notification services can be deployed through the firm’s own infrastructure, supplied by an outside service provider on company premises, or hosted remotely by an outside service provider. All three methods provide notification using a variety of methods such as email, voice notification to a cell phone, and text messaging. The notifications can be sent to all the devices selected, providing multiple means in which to get critical information to those who need it.
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FIGURE 5.7
TechTarget’s Business Continuity Strategies
Technology Recovery Strategies Companies create massive amounts of data vital to their survival and continued operations. A technology failure occurs when the ability of a company to operate is impaired because of a hardware, software, or data outage. Technology failures can destroy large amounts of vital data, often causing incidents , unplanned interruption of a service. An incident record contains all of the details of an incident. Incident management is the process responsible for managing how incidents are identified and corrected. Technology recovery strategies focus specifically on prioritizing the order for restoring hardware, software, and data across the organization that best meets business recovery requirements. A technology recovery strategy details the order of importance for recovering hardware, software, data centers, and networking (or connectivity). If one of these four vital components is not functioning, the entire system will be unavailable, shutting down cross-functional business processes such as order management and payroll. Figure 5.8 displays the key areas a company should focus on when developing technology recovery strategies.
SUPPORTING CHANGE: AGILE MIS INFRASTRUCTURE
LO 5.3: Describe the characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure.
Agile MIS infrastructure includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organization’s goals. If a company grows by 50 percent in a single year, its infrastructure and systems must be able to handle a 50 percent growth rate. If they cannot, they can severely hinder the company’s ability not only to grow but also to function.
The future of a company depends on its ability to meet its partners, suppliers, and customers any time of the day in any geographic location. Imagine owning an ebusiness and everyone on the Internet is tweeting and collaborating about how great your business idea is and how successful your company is going to be. Suddenly, you have 5 million global customers interested in your website. Unfortunately, you did not anticipate this many customers so quickly, and the system crashes. Users typing in your URL find a blank message stating the website is unavailable and to try back soon. Or even worse, they can get to your website but it takes three minutes to reload each time they click a button. The buzz soon dies about your business idea as some innovative web-savvy fast follower quickly copies your idea and creates a website that can handle the massive number of customers. The characteristics of agile MIS infrastructures can help ensure that your systems can meet and perform under any unexpected or unplanned changes. Figure 5.9 lists the seven abilities of an agile infrastructure.
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APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE
BUSINESS DRIVEN MIS
Disaster Recovery
Backup and recovery are essential for any computer system. How painful would it be if someone stole your laptop right now? How much critical information would you lose? How many hours would it take you to re-create your data? Perhaps that will motivate you to implement a backup procedure. How many of you have a disaster recovery plan? Disaster recovery is needed when your best friend dumps a grande latte on your computer or you accidently wash your thumb drive.
Disaster recovery plans are crucial for any business, and you should ensure that your company has everything it needs to continue operations if there is ever a disaster, such as 9/11. You need to decide which disasters are worth worrying about and which ones probably will never occur. For example, if you live in Colorado, chances are good you don’t have to worry about hurricanes, but avalanches are another story.
How often does a company need to back up its data? Where should the backup be stored? What types of disasters should companies in your state prepare for in case of an emergency? Why is it important to test the backup? What could happen to a company if it failed to create a disaster recovery plan?
FIGURE 5.8
Key Areas of Technology Recovery Strategies
Accessibility
Accessibility refers to the varying levels that define what a user can access, view, or perform when operating a system. Imagine the people at your college accessing the main student information system. Each person who accesses the system will have different needs and requirements; for example, a payroll employee will need to access vacation information and salary information, or a student will need to access course information and billing information. Each system user is provided with an access level that details which parts of the system the user can and cannot access and what the user can do when in the system. For example, you would not want your students to be able to view payroll information or a professor’s personal information; also, some users can only view information and are not allowed to create or delete information. Top-level MIS employees require administrator access , or unrestricted access to the entire system. Administrator access can perform functions such as resetting passwords, deleting accounts, and shutting down entire systems.
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FIGURE 5.9
Agile MIS Infrastructure Characteristics
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C director and inventor of the World Wide Web, stated, “the power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” Web accessibility means that people with disabilities, can use the web. The web accessibility initiative (WAI) brings together people from industry, disability organizations, government, and research labs from around the world to develop guidelines and resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities, including auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities. The goal of WAI is to allow people to access the full potential of the web, enabling people with disabilities to participate equally. For example, Apple includes screen magnification and VoiceOver on its iPhone, iPad, and iPod, which allows the blind and visually impaired to use the devices.
Availability
In a 24/7/365 ebusiness environment, business professionals need to use their systems whenever they want from wherever they want. Availability refers to the time frames when the system is operational. A system is called unavailable when it is not operating and cannot be used. High availability occurs when a system is continuously operational at all times. Availability is typically measured relative to “100 percent operational” or “never failing.” A widely held but difficult-to-achieve standard of availability for a system is known as “five 9s” (99.999 percent) availability. Some companies have systems available around the clock to support ebusiness operations, global customers, and online suppliers.
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Sometimes systems must be taken down for maintenance, upgrades, and fixes, which are completed during downtime. One challenge with availability is determining when to schedule system downtime if the system is expected to operate continuously. Performing maintenance during the evening might seem like a great idea, but evening in one city is morning somewhere else in the world, and business professionals scattered around the globe may not be able to perform specific job functions if the systems they need are unavailable. This is where companies deploy failover systems so they can take the primary system down for maintenance and activate the secondary system to ensure continuous operations.
Maintainability
Companies must watch today’s needs, as well as tomorrow’s, when designing and building systems that support agile infrastructures. Systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of company changes, environmental changes, and business changes. Maintainability (or flexibility) refers to how quickly a system can transform to support environmental changes. Maintainability helps to measure how quickly and effectively a system can be changed or repaired after a failure. For example, when starting a small business, you might not consider that you will have global customers, a common mistake. When building your systems, you might not design them to handle multiple currencies and different languages, which might make sense if the company is not currently performing international business. Unfortunately, when the first international order arrives, which happens easily with ebusiness, the system will be unable to handle the request because it does not have the flexibility to be easily reconfigured for a new language or currency. When the company does start growing and operating overseas, the system will need to be redeveloped, which is not an easy or cheap task, to handle multiple currencies and different languages.
Building and deploying flexible systems allow easy updates, changes, and reconfigurations for unexpected business or environmental changes. Just think what might have happened if Facebook had to overhaul its entire system to handle multiple languages. Another social networking business could easily have stepped in and become the provider of choice. That certainly would not be efficient or effective for business operations.
Portability
Portability refers to the ability of an application to operate on different devices or software platforms, such as different operating systems. Apple’s iTunes is readily available to users of Mac computers and PC computers, smart phones, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and so on. It is also a portable application. Because Apple insists on compatibility across its products, both software and hardware, Apple can easily add to its product, device, and service offerings without sacrificing portability. Many software developers are creating programs that are portable to all three devices—the iPhone, iPod, and iPad—which increases their target market and they hope their revenue.
Reliability
Reliability (or accuracy) ensures that a system is functioning correctly and providing accurate information. Inaccuracy can occur for many reasons, from the incorrect entry of information to the corruption of information during transmissions. Many argue that the information contained in Wikipedia is unreliable. Because the Wikipedia entries can be edited by any user, there are examples of rogue users inaccurately updating information. Many users skip over Google search findings that correlate to Wikipedia for this reason. Housing unreliable information on a website can put a company at risk of losing customers, placing inaccurate supplier orders, or even making unreliable business decisions. A vulnerability is a system weakness, such as a password that is never changed or a system left on while an employee goes to lunch, that can be exploited by a threat. Reliable systems ensure that vulnerabilities are kept at a minimum to reduce risk.
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APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE
BUSINESS DRIVEN MIS
Ranking the Ab-“ilities”
Do you know how Google makes so much money? Unlike traditional businesses, Google does not make money from the users of its service. Google makes money by charging the companies that want to appear in the sponsored section of a search result. After performing a Google search, you will notice three sections on the resulting page. Along the top and side are the sponsored search results, and the middle lists the organic search results. Google’s innovative marketing program, called AdWords, allows companies to bid on common search terms, and the highest bidder is posted first in the sponsored search results. Every time a user clicks a sponsored link, the company that owns the link has to pay Google. This is also called pay-per-click and can cost anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars for each click. A general search term such as “tropical vacation” costs less than a more specific search term such as “Hawaiian vacation.” Whichever company bids the most for the search term appears at the top of the sponsored section. Clicking the links in the organic search results does not incur any charges for the company that owns the link.
Rank the agile infrastructure ab-“ilities” for Google from most important to least important in terms of supporting Google’s MIS infrastructure and business operations. Be sure to provide the justification behind your ranking.
Scalability
Estimating company growth is a challenging task, in part because growth can occur in a number of forms—the firm can acquire new customers, new product lines, or new markets. Scalability describes how well a system can scale up, or adapt to the increased demands of growth. If a company grows faster than anticipated, it might experience a variety of problems, from running out of storage space to taking more time to complete transactions. Anticipating expected, and unexpected, growth is key to building scalable systems that can support that development.
Performance measures how quickly a system performs a process or transaction. Performance is a key component of scalability as systems that can’t scale suffer from performance issues. Just imagine your college’s content management system suddenly taking five minutes to return a page after a button is pushed. Now imagine if this occurs during your midterm exam and you miss the two-hour deadline because the system is so slow. Performance issues experienced by firms can have disastrous business impacts causing loss of customers, loss of suppliers, and even loss of help-desk employees. Most users will wait only a few seconds for a website to return a request before growing frustrated and either calling the support desk or giving up and moving on to another website.
Capacity represents the maximum throughput a system can deliver; for example, the capacity of a hard drive represents its size or volume. Capacity planning determines future environmental infrastructure requirements to ensure high-quality system performance. If a company purchases connectivity software that is outdated or too slow to meet demand, its employees will waste a great deal of time waiting for systems to respond to user requests. It is cheaper for a company to design and implement agile infrastructure that envisions growth requirements than to update all the equipment after the system is already operational. If a company with 100 workers merges with another company and suddenly 400 people are using the system, performance time could suffer. Planning for increases in capacity can ensure that systems perform as expected. Waiting for a system to respond to requests is not productive.
Web 2.0 is a big driver for capacity planning to ensure that agile infrastructures can meet the business’s operational needs. Delivering videos over the Internet requires enough bandwidth to satisfy millions of users during peak periods such as Friday and Saturday evenings. Video transmissions over the Internet cannot tolerate packet loss (blocks of data loss), and allowing one additional user to access the system could degrade the video quality for every user.
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BUSINESS DRIVEN DEBATE
Laptop? Notebook? Netbook? Tablet?
Thanks to Moore’s Law, computing devices are getting smaller, cheaper, and faster every year, allowing innovative companies to create new devices that are smaller and more powerful than current devices. Just look at desktop, laptop, notebook, and tablet computers. These are all different devices allowing users to connect and compute around the globe. Moore’s Law has been accurate about computing power roughly doubling every 18 months. Do you agree or disagree that Moore’s Law will continue to apply for the next 20 years? Why or why not?
Usability
Usability is the degree to which a system is easy to learn and efficient and satisfying to use. Providing hints, tips, shortcuts, and instructions for any system, regardless of its ease of use, is recommended. Apple understood the importance of usability when it designed the first iPod. One of the iPod’s initial attractions was the usability of the click wheel. One simple and efficient button operates the iPod, making it usable for all ages. And to ensure ease of use, Apple also made the corresponding iTunes software intuitive and easy to use. Serviceability is how quickly a third party can change a system to ensure it meets user needs and the terms of any contracts, including agreed levels of reliability, maintainability, or availability. When using a system from a third party, it is important to ensure the right level of serviceability for all users, including remote employees.
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section 5.2 |
Building Sustainable MIS Infrastructures |
LEARNING OUTCOMES
5.4Identify the environmental impacts associated with MIS.
MIS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
LO 5.4: Identify the environmental impacts associated with MIS.
The general trend in MIS is toward smaller, faster, and cheaper devices. Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel, the world’s largest producer of computer chips or microprocessors, observed in 1965 that continued advances in technological innovation made it possible to reduce the size of a computer chip (the brains of a computer, or even a cell phone now) while doubling its capacity every two years. His prediction that this trend would continue has come to be known as Moore’s Law , which refers to the computer chip performance per dollar doubling every 18 months. Although Moore originally assumed a two-year period, many sources today refer to the 18-month figure.
Moore’s Law is great for many companies because they can acquire large amounts of MIS equipment for cheaper and cheaper costs. As ebusinesses continue to grow, companies equip their employees with multiple forms of electronic devices ranging from laptops to cell phones to iPads. This is great for supporting a connected corporation, but significant unintended side effects include our dependence on fossil fuels and increased need for safe disposal of outdated computing equipment. Concern about these side effects has led many companies to turn to an ecological practice known as sustainable MIS. Sustainable, or green, MIS describes the production, management, use, and disposal of technology in a way that minimizes damage to the environment. Sustainable MIS is a critical part of corporate social responsibility , that is, companies’ acknowledged responsibility to society. Clean computing , a subset of sustainable MIS, refers to the environmentally responsible use, manufacture, and disposal of technology products and computer equipment. Although sustainable MIS refers to the environmental impact of computing as a whole, clean computing is specifically focused on the production of environmental waste. A green personal computer (green PC) is built using environment-friendly materials and designed to save energy. Building sustainable MIS infrastructures is a core initiative and critical success factor for socially responsible corporations. Figure 5.10 displays the three primary side effects of businesses’ expanded use of technology.
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APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE
BUSINESS DRIVEN ETHICS AND SECURITY
Ewaste and the Environment
By some estimates, there may be as many as 1 billion surplus or obsolete computers and monitors in the world. Consider California, where 6,000 computers become surplus every day. If not disposed of properly, this enormous ewaste stream, which can contain more than 1,000 toxic substances, is harmful to human beings and the environment. Beryllium is found in computer motherboards, chromium in floppy disks, lead in batteries and computer monitors, and mercury in alkaline batteries. One of the most toxic chemicals known is cadmium, found in many old laptops and computer chips.
In poorer countries, where the United States and Europe export some of their ewaste, the full impact of the environmental damage is quickly being realized. These areas have little use for obsolete electronic equipment so local recyclers resell some parts and burn the rest in illegal dumps, often near residential areas, releasing toxic and carcinogenic substances into the air, land, and water.5
Have you ever participated in ewaste? What can you do to ensure that you are safely disposing of electronic equipment including batteries? What can governments do to encourage companies to dispose of ewaste safely? What can be done to protect poorer countries from receiving ewaste? Create a list of the ways you can safely dispose of cell phones, computers, printers, ink cartridges, MP3 players, and batteries. What could you do to inform citizens of the issues associated with ewaste and educate them on safe disposal practices?
Increased Electronic Waste
The fulfillment of Moore’s Law has made technological devices smaller, cheaper, and faster, allowing more people from all income levels to purchase computing equipment. This increased demand is causing numerous environmental issues. Ewaste refers to discarded, obsolete, or broken electronic devices. Ewaste includes CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, printer cartridges, cell phones, iPods, external hard drives, TVs, VCRs, DVD players, microwaves, and so on. Some say one human year is equivalent to seven years of technological advancements. A personal computer has a life expectancy of only three to five years, and a cell phone is less than two years. An upcycle reuses or refurbishes ewaste and creates a new product.
Sustainable MIS disposal refers to the safe disposal of MIS assets at the end of their life cycle. It ensures that ewaste does not end up in landfills, causing environmental issues. A single computer contains more than 700 chemicals; some are toxic, such as mercury, lead, and cadmium. If a computer ends up in a landfill, the toxic substances it contains can leach into our land, water, and air. Recycling costs from $15 to $50 for a monitor or computer. Many companies, including public schools and universities, simply can’t afford the recycling costs.6
Ewaste also occurs when unused equipment stored in attics, basements, and storage facilities never reaches a recycling center. Retrieving the silver, gold, and other valuable metals from these devices is more efficient and less environmentally harmful than removing it from its natural environment.
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FIGURE 5.10
Three Pressures Driving Sustainable MIS Infrastructures
Currently, less than 20 percent of ewaste in the United States is recycled; however, even recycling does not guarantee that the equipment is disposed of safely. Although some recyclers process the material ethically, others ship it to countries such as China and India, where environmental enforcement is weak. This action poses its own global environmental problems.
Increased Energy Consumption
Energy consumption is the amount of energy consumed by business processes and systems. Huge increases in technology use have greatly amplified energy consumption. The energy consumed by a computer is estimated to produce as much as 10 percent of the amount of carbon dioxide produced by an automobile. Computer servers in the United States account for about 1 percent of the total energy needs of the country. Put in perspective, this is roughly equivalent to the energy consumption of Mississippi.
Computers consume energy even when they are not being used. For convenience and to allow for automatic updates and backup, the majority of computer equipment is never completely shut down. It draws energy 24 hours a day.
Increased Carbon Emissions
The major human-generated greenhouse gases, such as carbon emissions from energy use, are very likely responsible for the increases in climatic temperature over the past half a century. Additional temperature increases are projected over the next 100 years, with serious consequences for Earth’s environment, if carbon emissions , including the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide produced by business processes and systems, are not reduced.
In the United States, coal provides more than 50 percent of electrical power. When left on continuously, a single desktop computer and monitor can consume at least 100 watts of power per hour. To generate that much energy 24 hours a day for a year would require approximately 714 pounds of coal. When that coal is burned, it releases on average 5 pounds of sulfur dioxide, 5 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and 1,852 pounds (that is almost a ton) of carbon dioxide.7
SUPPORTING THE ENVIRONMENT: SUSTAINABLE MIS INFRASTRUCTURE
LO 5.5: Explain the three components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure along with their business benefits.
Combating ewaste, energy consumption, and carbon emissions requires a firm to focus on creating sustainable MIS infrastructures. A sustainable MIS infrastructure identifies ways that a company can grow in terms of computing resources while becoming less dependent on hardware and energy consumption. The components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure are displayed in Figure 5.11.
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APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE
BUSINESS DRIVEN DISCUSSION
How Big Is Your Carbon Footprint?
Inevitably, in going about our daily lives—commuting, sheltering our families, eating—each of us contributes to the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change. Yet, there are many things each of us, as individuals, can do to reduce our carbon emissions. The choices we make in our homes, our travel, the food we eat, and what we buy and throw away all influence our carbon footprint and can help ensure a stable climate for future generations.9
The Nature Conservancy’s carbon footprint calculator measures your impact on our climate. Its carbon footprint calculator estimates how many tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases your choices create each year. Visit the Nature Conservancy’s carbon footprint calculator to determine your carbon footprint and what you can do to reduce your emissions (http://www.nature.org/greenliving/carboncalculator/).
FIGURE 5.11
Sustainable MIS Infrastructure Components
Grid Computing
When a light is turned on, the power grid delivers exactly what is needed, instantly. Computers and networks can now work that way using grid computing. Grid computing is a collection of computers, often geographically dispersed, that are coordinated to solve a common problem. With grid computing, a problem is broken into pieces and distributed to many machines, allowing faster processing than could occur with a single system. Computers typically use less than 25 percent of their processing power, leaving more than 75 percent available for other tasks. Innovatively, grid computing takes advantage of this unused processing power by linking thousands of individual computers around the world to create a virtual supercomputer that can process intensive tasks. Grid computing makes better use of MIS resources, allowing greater scalability because systems can easily grow to handle peaks and valleys in demand, become more cost efficient, and solve problems that would be impossible to tackle with a single computer (see Figure 5.12).8
The uses of grid computing are numerous, including the creative environment of animated movies. DreamWorks Animation used grid computing to complete many of its hit films, including Antz, Shrek, Madagascar, and How to Train Your Dragon. The third Shrek film required more than 20 million computer hours to make (compared to 5 million for the first Shrek and 10 million for the second). At peak production times, DreamWorks dedicated more than 4,000 computers to its Shrek grid, allowing it to complete scenes in days and hours instead of months. With the increased grid computing power, the DreamWork’s animators were able to add more realistic movement to water, fire, and magic scenes (see Figure 5.13). With grid computing, a company can work faster or more efficiently, providing a potential competitive advantage and additional cost savings.10
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FIGURE 5.12
Grid Computing Example
Solving the Energy Issue with Smart Grids A smart grid delivers electricity using two-way digital technology. It is meant to solve the problem of the world’s outdated electrical grid, making it more efficient and reliable by adding the ability to monitor, analyze, and control the transmission of power remotely. The current U.S. power grid is said to have outlived its life expectancy by as much as 30 years. Smart grids provide users with real-time usage monitoring, allowing them to choose off-peak times for noncritical or less urgent applications or processes. Residents of Boulder, Colorado, can monitor their use of electricity and control appliances remotely due to the city’s large-scale smart grid system. Xcel Energy has installed 21,000 smart grid meters since the $100 million program started several years ago. Energy use by early adopters is down as much as 45 percent.11
FIGURE 5.13
Making Shrek 2 with Grid Computing
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Virtualized Computing
Most computers and even servers typically run only one operating system, such as Windows or Mac OS, and only one application. When a company invests in a large system such as inventory management, it dedicates a single server to house the system. This ensures that the system has enough capacity to run during peak times and to scale to meet demand. Also, many systems have specific hardware requirements along with detailed software requirements, making it difficult to find two systems with the same requirements that could share the same machine. Through the use of virtualization, computers can run multiple operating systems along with multiple software applications—all at the same time. Virtualization creates multiple virtual machines on a single computing device. A good analogy is a computer printer. In the past you had to purchase a fax machine, copy machine, answering machine, and computer printer separately. This was expensive, required enough energy to run four machines, and created additional amounts of ewaste. Today, you can buy a virtualized computer printer that functions as a fax machine, answering machine, and copy machine all on one physical machine, thereby reducing costs, power requirements, and ewaste. Virtualization is essentially a form of consolidation that can benefit sustainable MIS infrastructures in a variety of ways, for example:
By increasing availability of applications that can give a higher level of performance, depending on the hardware used.
By increasing energy efficiency by requiring less hardware to run multiple systems or applications.
By increasing hardware usability by running multiple operating systems on a single computer.
Originally, computers were designed to run a single application on a single operating system. This left most computers vastly underutilized. (As mentioned earlier, 75 percent of most computing power is available for other tasks.) Virtualization allows multiple virtual computers to exist on a single machine, which allows it to share its resources, such as memory and hard disk space, to run different applications and even different operating systems. Mac computers can run both the Apple operating system and the Windows PC operating system, with the use of virtualization software (see Figure 5.14). Unfortunately, virtualization, at least at the moment, is not available for a PC to run Mac software. There are three basic categories of virtualization:
Storage virtualization combines multiple network storage devices so they appear to be a single storage device.
Network virtualization combines networks by splitting the available bandwidth into independent channels that can be assigned in real time to a specific device.
Server virtualization combines the physical resources, such as servers, processors, and operating systems, from the applications. (This is the most common form and typically when you hear the term virtualization, you can assume server virtualization.)
Virtualization is also one of the easiest and quickest ways to achieve a sustainable MIS infrastructure because it reduces power consumption and requires less equipment that needs to be manufactured, maintained, and later disposed of safely. Managers no longer have to assign servers, storage, or network capacity permanently to single applications. Instead, they can assign the hardware resources when and where they are needed, achieving the availability, flexibility, and scalability a company needs to thrive and grow. Also, by virtually separating the operating system and applications from the hardware, if there is a disaster or hardware failure, it is easy to port the virtual machine to a new physical machine, allowing a company to recovery quickly. One of the primary uses of virtualization is for performing backup, recovery, and disaster recovery. Using virtual servers or a virtualization service provider, such as Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, to host disaster recovery is more sustainable than a single company incurring the expense of having redundant physical systems. Also, these providers’ data centers are built to withstand natural disasters and are typically located far away from big cities.
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APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE
BUSINESS DRIVEN INNOVATION
Upcycle Your Old PCs
Imagine walking into your friend’s home and seeing her computer with live fish swimming around inside it. Upon taking a second look, you realize she has upcycled her old Mac into an innovative macquarium. Some young entrepreneurs are making a fortune by upcycling old Mac desktops as fish tanks. An upcycle reuses or refurbishes ewaste and creates a new product. With the growing problem of ewaste, one alternative is to upcycle your old technology by creating innovative household products or personal accessories. Take a look at one of the devices you are currently using to see whether you can create an upcycled product. Here are a few great ideas to get you started:
Keyboard magnets
Computer aquariums
Mac mailboxes
Keyboard calendars
Floppy disk pencil holders
Circuit board key rings
RAM key chains
Circuit earrings
Cable bracelets
Motherboard clocks
Mouse belt buckles
FIGURE 5.14
Virtualization Allows an Apple Macintosh Computer to Run OS X and Windows 7
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Virtual Data Centers A data center is a facility used to house management information systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. Data centers, sometimes referred to as server farms, consume power and require cooling and floor space while working to support business growth without disrupting normal business operations and the quality of service. The amount of data a data center stores has grown exponentially over the years as our reliance on information increases. Backups, graphics, documents, presentations, photos, and audio and video files all contribute to the ever-expanding information footprint that requires storage. One of the most effective ways to limit the power consumption and cooling requirements of a data center is to consolidate parts of the physical infrastructure, particularly by reducing the number of physical servers through virtualization. For this reason, virtualization is having a profound impact on data centers as the sheer number of servers a company requires to operate decreases, thereby boosting growth and performance while reducing environmental impact, as shown in Figure 5.15. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo! have all created data centers along the Columbia River in the northwestern United States. In this area, each company can benefit from affordable land, high-speed Internet access, plentiful water for cooling, and even more important, inexpensive electricity. These factors are critical to today’s large-scale data centers, whose sheer size and power needs far surpass those of the previous generation. The Microsoft data center in Quincy, Washington, is larger than 10 football fields and is powered entirely by hydroelectricity, power generated from flowing water rather than from burning coal or other fossil fuel.12
If we take a holistic and integrated approach to overall company growth, the benefits of integrating information MIS infrastructures, environmental MIS infrastructures, and sustainable MIS infrastructures become obvious. For example, a company could easily create a backup of its software and important information in one or more geographically dispersed locations using cloud computing. This would be far cheaper than building its own hot and cold sites in different areas of the country. In the case of a security breach, failover can be deployed as a virtual machine in one location of the cloud and be shut down as another virtual machine in a different location on the cloud comes online.
Cloud Computing
Imagine a cyclical business that specializes in Halloween decorations and how its sales trends and orders vary depending on the time of year. The majority of sales occur in September and October, and the remaining 10 months have relatively small sales and small system usage. The company does not want to invest in massive expensive servers that sit idle 10 months of the year just to meet its capacity spikes in September and October. The perfect solution for this company is cloud computing, which makes it easier to gain access to the computing power that was once reserved for large corporations. Small to medium-size companies no longer have to make big capital investments to access the same powerful systems that large companies run.
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cloud computing stores, manages, and processes data and applications over the Internet rather than on a personal computer or server. Cloud computing offers new ways to store, access, process, and analyze information and connect people and resources from any location in the world an Internet connection is available. As shown in Figure 5.16, users connect to the cloud from their personal computers or portable devices by using a client, such as a web browser. To these individual users, the cloud appears as their personal application, device, or document. It is like storing all of your software and documents in the cloud, and all you need is a device to access the cloud. No more hard drives, software, or processing power—that is all located in the cloud, transparent to the users. Users are not physically bound to a single computer or network; they can access their programs and documents from wherever they are, whenever they need to. Just think of having your hard drive located in the sky and you can access your information and programs using any device from wherever you are. The best part is that even if your machine crashes, is lost, or is stolen, the information hosted in the cloud is safe and always available. (See Figure 5.17 for cloud providers and Figure 5.18 for cloud computing advantages.)
FIGURE 5.15
Ways for Data Centers to Become Sustainable
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APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE
BUSINESS DRIVEN GLOBALIZATION
Solving the Ewaste Problem (StEP)
The United States disposes of more than 384 million units of ewaste yearly and currently recycles less than 20 percent, according to the Electronics TakeBack Coalition. The remaining 80 percent is burned or dumped in landfills, leaking toxic substances such as mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, and beryllium into the environment. Reports predict that ewaste will weigh as much as 200 Empire State Buildings by 2017. Solving the Ewaste Problem (StEP) Initiative is a group represented by the United Nations organizations, governments, and science organizations, and their mission is to ensure safe and responsible ewaste disposal. StEP predicts ewaste will grow by a third in the next five years with the United States and China being the biggest contributors. Until recently, comprehensive data on global ewaste has been hard to collect because the definition of ewaste differs among countries. For example, the United States only includes consumer electronics such as TVs and computers, whereas Europe includes everything that has a battery or power cord in the ewaste category.13
The growth of ewaste is an opportunity for entrepreneurs. Research the web and find examples of schools around the country that are responsibly tackling the ewaste problem. In a group, create a plan for implementing an ewaste recycling program at your school.
FIGURE 5.16
Cloud Computing Example
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FIGURE 5.17
Overview of Cloud Providers
Multi-tenancy in the cloud means that a single instance of a system serves multiple customers. In the cloud, each customer is called a tenant, and multiple tenants can access the same system. Multi-tenancy helps reduce operational costs associated with implementing large systems because the costs are dispersed across many tenants as opposed to single-tenancy , in which each customer or tenant must purchase and maintain an individual system. With a multi-tenancy cloud approach, the service provider only has one place to update its system. With a single-tenancy cloud approach, the service provider would have to update its system in every company where the software was running. The cloud fabric is the software that makes possible the benefits of cloud computing, such as multi-tenancy. A cloud fabric controller is an individual who monitors and provisions cloud resources, similar to a server administrator at an individual company. Cloud fabric controllers provision resources, balance loads, manage servers, update systems, and ensure that all environments are available and operating correctly. Cloud fabric is the primary reason cloud computing promotes all of the seven abilities, allowing a business to make its data and applications accessible, available, maintainable, portable, reliable, scalable, and usable. Figure 5.19 displays the top business cloud applications.14
FIGURE 5.18
Cloud Computing Advantages
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The cloud offers a company higher availability, greater reliability, and improved accessibility—all with affordable high-speed access. For flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency, cloud computing is quickly becoming a viable option for companies of all sizes. With the cloud, you could simply purchase a single license for software such as Microsoft Office or Outlook at a far discounted rate and not worry about the hassle of installing and upgrading the software on your computer. No more worries that you don’t have enough memory to run a new program because the hardware is provided in the cloud, along with the software. You simply pay to access the program. Think of this the same way you do your telephone service. You simply pay to access a vendor’s service, and you do not have to pay for the equipment required to carry the call around the globe. You also don’t have to worry about scalability because the system automatically handles peak loads, which can be spread out among the systems in the cloud. Figure 5.20 displays the characteristics of cloud computing.
FIGURE 5.19
Top Cloud-Based Business Applications
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FIGURE 5.20
Characteristics of Cloud Computing
Because additional cloud resources are always available, companies no longer have to purchase systems for infrequent computing tasks that need intense processing power, such as preparing tax returns during tax season or increased sales transactions during certain holiday seasons. If a company needs more processing power, it is always there in the cloud—and available on a cost-efficient basis. Heroku is the leading cloud platform for building and deploying social and mobile customer applications. Built on open standards, Heroku supports multiple open frameworks, languages, and databases.
With cloud computing, individuals or businesses pay only for the services they need, when they need them, and where, much as we use and pay for electricity. In the past, a company would have to pay millions of dollars for the hardware, software, and networking equipment required to implement a large system such as payroll or sales management. A cloud computing user can simply access the cloud and request a single license to a payroll application. The user does not have to incur any hardware, software, or networking expenses. As the business grows and the user requires more employees to have access to the system, the business simply purchases additional licenses. Rather than running software on a local computer or server, companies can now reach to the cloud to combine software applications, data storage, and considerable computing power. Utility computing offers a pay-per-use revenue model similar to a metered service such as gas or electricity. Many cloud computing service providers use utility computing cloud infrastructures, which are detailed in Figure 5.21.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivers hardware networking capabilities, including the use of servers, networking, and storage, over the cloud using a pay-per-use revenue model. With IaaS, the customer rents the hardware and provides its own custom applications or programs. IaaS customers save money by not having to spend a large amount of capital purchasing expensive servers, which is a great business advantage considering some servers cost more than $100,000. The service is typically paid for on a usage basis, much like a basic utility service such as electricity or gas. IaaS offers a cost-effective solution for companies that need their computing resources to grow and shrink as business demand changes. This is known as dynamic scaling , which means the MIS infrastructure can be automatically scaled up or down based on requirements. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offers backup services that use cloud resources to protect applications and data from disruption caused by disaster. It gives an organization a total system backup that allows for business continuity in the event of system failure. DRaaS is typically part of a disaster recovery plan or business continuity plan.
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FIGURE 5.21
Cloud Service Delivery Models
Currently the most popular IaaS operation is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, generally known as Amazon EC2, or simply EC2. EC2 provides a web interface through which customers can load and run their own applications on Amazon’s computers. Customers control their own operating environment, so they can create, run, and stop services as needed, which is why Amazon describes EC2 as elastic. IaaS is a perfect fit for companies with research-intensive projects that need to process large amounts of information at irregular intervals, such as those in the scientific or medical fields. Cloud computing services offer these companies considerable cost savings because they can perform testing and analysis at levels that are not possible without access to additional and very costly computing infrastructure.
Software as a Service (SaaS) Software as a Service (SaaS) delivers applications over the cloud using a pay-per-use revenue model. Before its introduction, companies often spent huge amounts of money implementing and customizing specialized applications to satisfy their business requirements. Many of these applications were difficult to implement, expensive to maintain, and challenging to use. Usability was one of the biggest drivers for creating interest in and success for cloud computing service providers.
SaaS offers a number of advantages; the most obvious is tremendous cost savings. The software is priced on a per-use basis with no up-front costs, so companies get the immediate benefit of reducing capital expenditures. They also get the added benefits of scalability and flexibility to test new software on a rental basis.
Salesforce.com is one of the most popular SaaS providers. It built and delivered a sales automation application, suitable for the typical salesperson, that automates functions such as tracking sales leads and prospects and forecasting. Tapping the power of SaaS can provide access to a large-scale, secure infrastructure, along with any needed support, which is especially valuable for a start-up or small company with few financial resources.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) supports the deployment of entire systems, including hardware, networking, and applications, using a pay-per-use revenue model. PaaS is a perfect solution for a business because it passes on to the service provider the headache and challenges of buying, managing, and maintaining web development software. With PaaS the development, deployment, management, and maintenance is based entirely in the cloud and performed by the PaaS provider, allowing the company to focus resources on its core initiatives. Every aspect of development, including the software needed to create it and the hardware to run it, lives in the cloud. PaaS helps companies minimize operational costs and increase productivity by providing all the following without up-front investment:
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FIGURE 5.22
Cloud Computing Environments
Increased security.
Access to information anywhere and anytime.
Centralized information management.
Easy collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers.
Increased speed to market with significantly less cost.
One of the most popular PaaS services is Google’s Application Engine, which builds and deploys web applications for a company. Google’s Application Engine is easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as a company’s web-based application needs grow. Google’s Application Engine is free and offers a standard storage limit and enough processing power and network usage to support a web application serving about 5 million page views a month. When a customer scales beyond these initial limits, it can pay a fee to increase capacity and performance. This can turn into some huge costs savings for a small business that does not have enough initial capital to buy expensive hardware and software for its web applications. Just think, a two-person company can access the same computing resources as Google. That makes good business sense. Regardless of which cloud model a business chooses, it can select from four cloud computing environments—public, private, community, and hybrid (see Figure 5.22).
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Public Cloud Public cloud promotes massive, global, and industrywide applications offered to the general public. In a public cloud, customers are never required to provision, manage, upgrade, or replace hardware or software. Pricing is utility-style and customers pay only for the resources they use. A few great examples of public cloud computing include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Windows Azure, and Google Cloud Connect.
Private Cloud Private cloud serves only one customer or organization and can be located on the customer’s premises or off the customer’s premises. A private cloud is the optimal solution for an organization such as the government that has high data security concerns and values information privacy. Private clouds are far more expensive than public clouds because costs are not shared across multiple customers.
Community Cloud Community cloud serves a specific community with common business models, security requirements, and compliance considerations. Community clouds are emerging in highly regulated industries such as financial services and pharmaceutical companies.
Hybrid Cloud Hybrid cloud includes two or more private, public, or community clouds, but each cloud remains separate and is only linked by technology that enables data and application portability. For example, a company might use a private cloud for critical applications that maintain sensitive data and a public cloud for nonsensitive data applications. The usage of both private and public clouds together is an example of a hybrid cloud. Cloud bursting is when a company uses its own computing infrastructure for normal usage and accesses the cloud when it needs to scale for peak load requirements, ensuring that a sudden spike in usage does not result in poor performance or system crashes.
Deploying an MIS infrastructure in the cloud forever changes the way an organization’s MIS systems are developed, deployed, maintained, and managed. Moving to the cloud is a fundamental shift, moving from a physical world to a logical world, making irrelevant the notion of which individual server applications or data reside on. As a result, organizations and MIS departments need to change the way they view systems and the new opportunities to find competitive advantages.
LEARNING OUTCOME REVIEW
Learning Outcome 5.1: Explain MIS infrastructure and its three primary types.
The three primary areas where enterprise architects focus when maintaining a firm’s MIS infrastructure are:
Supporting operations: Information MIS infrastructure identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured.
Supporting change: Agile MIS infrastructure includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organization’s goals.
Supporting the environment: Sustainable MIS infrastructure identifies ways that a company can grow in terms of computing resources while becoming less dependent on hardware and energy consumption.
Learning Outcome 5.2: Identify the three primary areas associated with an information MIS infrastructure.
The three primary areas an information infrastructure provides to support continuous business operations are:
Backup and recovery: A backup is an exact copy of a system’s information. Recovery is the ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash or failure that includes restoring the information backup.
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Disaster recovery plan: This plan provides a detailed process for recovering information or a system in the event of a catastrophic disaster.
Business continuity plan: This details how a company recovers and restores critical business operations and systems after a disaster or extended disruption.
Learning Outcome 5.3: Describe the characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure.
Accessibility refers to the varying levels that define what a user can access, view, or perform when operating a system.
Availability refers to the time frames when the system is operational.
Maintainability (or flexibility) refers to how quickly a system can transform to support environmental changes.
Portability refers to the ability of an application to operate on different devices or software platforms, such as different operating systems.
Reliability (or accuracy) ensures that a system is functioning correctly and providing accurate information.
Scalability describes how well a system can scale up or adapt to the increased demands of growth.
Usability is the degree to which a system is easy to learn and efficient and satisfying to use.
Learning Outcome 5.4: Identify the environmental impacts associated with MIS.
Increased energy consumption, increased electronic waste, and increased carbon emissions are all associated with MIS. Ewaste refers to discarded, obsolete, or broken electronic devices. Sustainable MIS disposal refers to the safe disposal of MIS assets at the end of their life cycle.
Learning Outcome 5.5: Explain the three components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure along with their business benefits.
The components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure include:
Grid computing: A collection of computers, often geographically dispersed, that are coordinated to solve a common problem.
Cloud computing: The use of resources and applications hosted remotely on the Internet. The term comes (at least in part) from the image of a cloud to represent the Internet or some large networked environment.
Virtualized computing: The creation of multiple virtual machines on a single computing device.
OPENING CASE QUESTIONS
1.Knowledge: List the ways that an agile MIS infrastructure supports Box’s business.
2.Comprehension: Describe the reasons Box can help a company with its disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan.
3.Application: Apply the concepts of cloud computing to Box’s business model.
4.Analysis: Analyze how Box can benefit from a sustainable MIS infrastructure.
5.Synthesis: Develop a way that a company could benefit from grid computing by using Box.
6.Evaluate: Assess how Box uses server virtualization to support its growth.
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KEY TERMS
Business continuity planning (BCP)
Corporate social responsibility
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
Emergency notification service
Green personal computer (green PC)
Information MIS infrastructure
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Maintainability (or flexibility)
Sustainable MIS infrastructure
Web accessibility initiative (WAI)
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1.How often should a business back up its data?
2.Why is it important to ensure that backups are working and can be restored?
3.What is the difference between a disaster recovery plan and a business continuity plan?
4.What are the three forms of MIS infrastructures and what do they support?
5.List the characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure and explain why they are all critical for supporting change.
6.Explain what capacity planning is and how it can help a business prepare for growth.
7.Explain the difference between fault tolerance and failover.
8.Compare the differences among a hot, cold, and warm site.
9.What is Moore’s Law and how does it affect companies?
10.List the business benefits of using grid computing.
11.Identify the benefits and challenges of cloud computing.
12.What is a data center and why would a business develop one?
13.List and describe the three most popular cloud computing delivery models.
14.Why would a company want to use virtualization?
15.Explain why a business today would want to follow sustainable MIS practices.
16.Explain why ebusiness is contributing to the three pressures driving sustainable MIS infrastructures.
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CLOSING CASE ONE
UPS Invests $1 Billion to Go Green
United Parcel Service (UPS) will make about $1 billion in technology investments to improve the efficiency of its operations, with the goal of cutting billions more from its costs over the long term. One of its main goals is to improve the speed and efficiency of its delivery operations. To achieve that, UPS is equipping its vans with sensors that allow it to collect data about things such as fuel consumption, chosen routes, and how much time its engines spend idling. Reducing fuel consumption will help UPS not only to cut costs, but also to be more environmentally responsible. A big portion of the company’s costs comes from transporting packages by air. In fact, UPS is the world’s ninth-largest airline, so it is trying to conserve aircraft fuel as well by lowering flight speeds and better planning to avoid duplication of routes. But a lot of fuel is also burned by its trucks, and the sensors being implemented there could save the company millions of dollars.
UPS is installing about 200 sensors in its vehicles—in the brakes, engine box, and on the exterior—to collect data and pinpoint opportunities when drivers can adjust their driving to maximize fuel efficiency. The company wants to reduce idle time of its delivery trucks because each hour spent idling burns about a gallon of fuel.
The company is also installing equipment to track the routes drivers take to deliver packages. Every morning the drivers are briefed on the data captured by the sensors and how they could drive differently to save fuel. UPS wants to optimize the number of times a vehicle has to start, stop, reverse, turn, or back up.
Green Data Center
The company is also investing in more efficient cooling technologies at its two data centers, which are in Mahwah, New Jersey, and Alpharetta, Georgia. During the winter, the company can shut off its chiller equipment and use outside air for cooling.
The Alpharetta data center has a 650,000-gallon water tank outside for cooling and a heat exchanger to dissipate the heat captured in the fluid faster. The water flows in a circular motion around the data center, cooling the equipment, and the heat exchanger helps lower the temperature of the hot exhaust water more quickly.
UPS is also investing in faster server processors, allowing it to consolidate existing servers through virtualization. That helps lower energy costs and reduces the physical footprint of its servers. And the company has been consolidating smaller server rooms that were scattered around the world. These changes are saving UPS around $400,000 each year.15
Questions
1.Why do you think UPS is embracing sustainable technologies?
2.How is UPS developing a sustainable MIS infrastructure?
3.What business benefits will UPS gain from virtualization?
4.What role does each characteristic of an agile MIS infrastructure play in helping UPS operate its business?
5.How could UPS benefit from cloud or grid computing?
6.What types of ethical issues might UPS encounter with the tracking technology it has placed in its trucks?
7.What types of security issues might UPS encounter with the tracking technology it has placed in its trucks?
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CLOSING CASE TWO
Pandora’s Music Box
Napster was one of the first service providers for sharing online music. Many other companies have attempted to jump into the online music business legally, and most found little success. However, Pandora, the Internet radio site, is becoming the exception. Pandora provides users with the ability to choose specific artists or categories of music and then creates individualized playlists. Based on user feedback to Pandora’s suggestions of similar tracks, the site learns what selections each listener prefers for his or her playlist and uses that information to generate a unique customized listening experience for each.
At the heart of Pandora’s business is the Music Genome Project (MGP), a computerized jukebox of more than 700,000 works by 80,000 artists, with new ones added every day. Each selection within the MGP is categorized by hundreds of characteristics, including artist and genre and covering the qualities of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, composition, and lyrics. For example, if someone is looking for a song with a certain tempo or wants to know what the lyrics are about, Pandora can supply that information. The company has 50 employees whose sole job is to listen to and analyze music along with assigning more than 400 characteristics to each track.
Computing Merges with Connectivity
Pandora is a perfect example of cloud computing as a result of three major trends:
1.The marriage of computing and connectivity can now occur without having to be tethered to a single location. It’s among the biggest disruptive forces of modern times, one that will redefine business models for decades to come.
2.The mobile Internet is now pervasive.
3.The availability of low-cost, always-on computers—smart phones—that allow sophisticated software to conduct complex tasks on the go.
Pandora is strategically planning to reach a broad, global market by embedding itself in all sorts of Internet-enabled electronic devices that can access its services directly through the cloud. Pandora’s music offerings are now being embedded in everything from thin LED televisions to Blu-ray players to digital frames. Customers are listening to Pandora through their Blu-ray players, iPods, iPhones, and BlackBerrys, and soon cars will come with Pandora preinstalled.
The Pandora team envisions Pandora playing everywhere, allowing users to create as many as 100 stations, allowing for a nearly infinite list of musical opportunities. Since its founding in 2000, Pandora has registered more than 50 million listeners and adds thousands more every day.
A basic membership, which includes an occasional advertisement or two, is free. Members are allowed 40 hours a month to listen to their personal stations. If users want more than 40 hours, they can purchase unlimited playing time for 99 cents per month. Users can upgrade even further to a Pandora One account for $36 a year that includes unlimited playing time, no advertisements, and a higher-quality sound.
What drives Pandora’s business? Other than its valued customer base, it is the company’s solid MIS infrastructure that supports its growth, operations, and profits. So far, Pandora’s investment in MIS infrastructure has delivered wonderful results as well as future opportunities. The company can now develop new applications that support its core functions more rapidly than ever. And since Pandora is located in the cloud, the company has created an MIS infrastructure that is accessible, available, flexible, scalable, reliable, and usable and that performs to meet the needs of its growing customer community.16
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Questions
1.List the ways that an agile MIS infrastructure supports Pandora’s business.
2.Describe the reasons Pandora would create a disaster recovery plan and a business continuity plan.
3.Apply the concepts of cloud computing to Pandora’s business model.
4.Analyze how Pandora is using sustainable MIS infrastructures.
5.Develop a way that Pandora could benefit from grid computing.
6.Assess the use of virtualization to support Pandora’s business growth while helping the environment.
CRITICAL BUSINESS THINKING
1.Universities Are Switching to Gmail Schools around the world are moving to cloud computing applications such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Calendar. Yale had planned to move from its own email system to Google Mail, but at the last minute decided to cancel the project because school administrators and faculty members did not believe the move could support their business requirements. Do you agree or disagree that Google Gmail would be unable to replace a university’s private email system? What are the advantages and disadvantages of a private email system? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a cloud application such as Google Gmail? What choice would you make if you were the primary decision maker for choosing your school’s email system?
2.Desktop Virtualization Every day users are becoming more comfortable with accessing and storing information in the cloud. This creates increased demand on MIS personnel to help manage, control, and provide access to that information—not just on company-issued computers, but on any number of devices, including personal ones. More and more employees want to be able to use their own computing devices—cell phones, netbooks, laptops—instead of company-issued ones. For instance, many students graduating from college have been exposed to Macs and may even own one, yet they are finding PCs as the standard computer of choice for most companies. Do you think it is a good business practice to allow your employees to use their personal devices for work-related business? What are the challenges of allowing users to port business applications to their personal devices? What are the challenges of allowing users to connect to corporate systems with personal devices?
3.I Don’t Have a Temperature, But I’m Positive I Have a Virus Think how horrible it would be to finish your term paper at 4 a.m. and find out that your computer has a virus and you just lost your entire document. Or perhaps you submit your final paper, which is worth 50 percent of your grade, and then head off to Colorado for winter break. You return to find that you failed the course, and you frantically check email to find out what happened. A message from your professor informs you that your document was corrupt and couldn’t be opened and that you had 24 hours to resend the file, which you missed because you were skiing down the slopes. Have you ever experienced having a file corrupted? If so, what could you have done to recover from this situation? Do you think your instructor ever receives corrupted files? How did the file become corrupted? Do you think your instructor would be suspicious if you submitted a corrupted file?
4.Sustainable Departments Energy prices and global warming are discussed daily in the news as the environmental impact of ewaste is just beginning to be recognized. Sustainability and corporate social responsibility need to be taken seriously by all managers because everyone should take an active role in helping to preserve the environment. List the different departments in a business and the types of environmental issues they typically encounter. Which department do you think creates the most ewaste? Which department uses the greatest amount of electricity or has the largest carbon footprint? What can each department do to help combat its environmental issues? Why do all managers, and for that matter all employees, need to be aware of environmental issues and ways they can create sustainable MIS infrastructures?
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5.Facebook’s Energy Use Cheap electricity is great for keeping business costs down, but it often means relying on coal for power. Facebook recently commissioned a new computing facility in Oregon and is using power from PacifiCorp, a utility that gets the majority of its energy from coal-fired power stations, which are major contributors of greenhouse gas emissions. As more and more people subscribe to Facebook, its energy needs are increasing almost exponentially. Do you agree that Facebook made a wise business decision in selecting a utility provider that uses coal-fired power stations? What alternative sources of energy could Facebook have used to power its computing facility? Do you think Facebook’s core customers care about the environment? What types of business challenges might Facebook encounter if it continues using coal-fired power stations?
6.Planning for Disaster Recovery You are the new senior analyst in the MIS department at Beltz, a large snack food manufacturing company. The company is located on the beautiful shoreline in Charleston, South Carolina. The company’s location is one of its best and worst features. The weather and surroundings are beautiful, but the threat of hurricanes and other natural disasters is high. What types of information should be contained in Beltz’s disaster recovery plan that will minimize any risks involved with a natural disaster?
7.Comparing Backup and Recovery Systems Research the Internet to find three vendors of backup and recovery systems. Compare and contrast the three systems and determine which one you would recommend if you were installing a backup and recovery system for a medium-sized business, with 3,500 employees, that maintains information on the stock market. Compile your findings in a presentation that you can give to your class that details the three systems’ strengths and weaknesses, along with your recommendation.
8.Cool Schools Very large computers and data centers incur huge energy costs keeping electronic components cooled. Where is your school’s data center located? How big is it? What security measures does the facility enforce? Can you get a tour of it? If it is on campus, how is the facility cooled? How is the power supplied? Heating and cooling computer systems are certainly a big issue. Think of ways you could reuse the heat from a data center, such as sending it to a college dorm. Could alternative resources, such as a nearby river or a lake, provide added cooling? What unanticipated environmental issues could this create?
ENTREPRENEURIAL CHALLENGE
BUILD YOUR OWN BUSINESS
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1.On your way to work this morning, you stopped for gas. When you were inside paying, someone broke into your car and stole your computer bag. You did not notice until you arrived at your business and began looking for your bag. As you begin to realize all of the data you just lost—customer lists, profit, and loss analysis, tax returns, email, sales information, payroll files, and so on—you begin to wonder when you last backed up your hard drive. Now that you have been stung by a painful data loss experience, you realize the importance of having a backup strategy. Create a detailed backup strategy and disaster recovery plan for your business. Be sure to include details such as the types of backup you will perform, frequency of backups, and location of backups. (Be sure to identify your business and the name of your company.)
2.Rank the characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure in order of importance to your business and be sure to provide detailed information on each characteristic and your justification for its ranking.
3.Cloud computing is a business driven MIS infrastructure that supports growth, operations, and profits. It helps today’s businesses innovate by using resources and applications hosted remotely as a shared service on the Internet. You have decided to research the different types of cloud computing services. Create a report listing the types of services your business should implement and the advantages and disadvantages of each.
APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE BUSINESS PROJECTS
PROJECT IRanking MIS characteristics
In a group, review the list of MIS infrastructure characteristics that support growth and rank them in order of their impact on a company’s success, using 1 to indicate the biggest impact and 7 the least.
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MIS Infrastructure Characteristics |
Business Impact |
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Accessibility |
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Availability |
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Maintainability |
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Portability |
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Reliability |
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Scalability |
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Usability |
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PROJECT IIDesigning a Company Infrastructure
Components of an MIS infrastructure include everything from documentation to business concepts to software and hardware. Deciding which components to implement and how to implement them can be a challenge. New MIS components are released daily, and business needs continually change. An MIS infrastructure that meets your company’s needs today may not meet those needs tomorrow. Building an MIS infrastructure that is accessible, available, flexible, reliable, scalable, and usable and performs well is key to your company’s growth, operations, and profitability.
You are the manager for a large clothing company called Xedous. You are responsible for developing the initial MIS infrastructure. Create a list of questions you will need answered to develop it. Here are examples of a few of the questions you might ask:
What are the company’s growth expectations?
Will systems be able to handle additional users?
How long will information be stored in the systems?
How much customer history must be stored?
What are the company’s business hours?
What are the company’s backup requirements?
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PROJECT IIIRecycle Your Cell Phone
For all those excited to get a new iPhone with its numerous applications and cool games, what will you do with your old cell phone? You can help the environment and recycle your phone, PDA, charger, and batteries. Recycling cell phones helps save energy and keep reusable materials out of landfills. Cell phones are made of plastic, copper, and precious metals, which require energy to extract and manufacture. If you decide to recycle your cell phone, be sure to terminate the service, delete any contacts or stored information, and take out the SIM card.
If your old cell phone is still working, you might also want to consider donating it to charity. Many programs will accept working cell phones that they donate to people in need, such as survivors of domestic violence, because old cell phones can still dial 911 even after the service is disconnected. To find local agencies where you can donate your cell phone, visit ncadv.org. Cell phones are only a small percentage of the total computer equipment organizations replace each year. What happens to all of those old laptops, notebooks, servers, and monitors? What is the environmental impact of throwing a computer system into a landfill? What can companies do to recycle their computer equipment? What can the government do to help motivate companies and individuals to recycle?
PROJECT IVBack on Your Feet
You are working for GetSmart, a document creation company for legal professionals. Due to the highly sensitive nature of their work, employees must store all information on the network drive and are not allowed to back up the data to a CD, flash drive, or any other type of external storage, including home computers. The company has been following this policy for the past three years without any problems. You return to work Monday morning after a long weekend to find that the building was struck by lightning, destroying several servers. Unfortunately, the backup network also failed, so all the data from your department have been lost.
Because of this loss, the MIS manager and four colleagues who developed the company backup policy were fired.
You have been placed on a committee with several of your peers to revamp the backup and recovery policies and create a new disaster recovery plan. You must create policies and procedures that will preserve the sensitive nature of the documents while ensuring that the company is safe from disasters. Be sure to address a worst-case scenario in which the entire building is lost.
PROJECT VGrowing, Growing, Gone
You are the founder of Black Pearl, a small comic book start-up. The good news is Black Pearl is tremendously successful, with 34 employees in a functional and creative office in downtown Chicago. The comics you produce are of extremely high quality. The artwork is unmatched, and fans find the story lines compelling. Black Pearl comics are quickly becoming classics with extremely loyal customers. You produce all the comics and sell them in your store and via the Internet to individuals all over the United States.
You had a vision when you started Black Pearl. You knew the potential of your business model to revamp the comic industry. You purchased high-end computers and customizable software to support your operations. Now, you are faced with a new dilemma. You have a large international following, and you have decided to pursue international opportunities. You would like to open stores in Japan, France, and Brazil over the next year. To determine whether this is possible, you need to evaluate whether your MIS infrastructure is agile enough to support international requirements. Brainstorm all of the business nuances that will be different when working with international companies and customers. Create a list of questions your MIS department will need to answer to determine whether your system is agile enough to support international business.
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PROJECT VIExcuses, Excuses, Excuses
Here are a few examples of the strangest and most unusual excuses employees use when missing work.
I have a sunburn.
I’m not sure why but I woke up in Canada.
I was caught selling an alligator.
I was locked in the trunk of an abandoned car.
I have a note from my mom that I could not go to work yesterday.
I’m just not into it today.
I was riding my motorcycle and I accidentally hit a nun.
Some person threw poison ivy at me and now I have a rash on my face.
I need to stay home as I am convinced I can catch my spouse having an affair.
I was chasing a seagull and fell down and had to go to the hospital.
I have a migraine from eating too many jalapeño peppers.
This chapter focuses on MIS infrastructures, the main building blocks that function together to control the entire organization’s systems. If your systems cannot operate, then your organization cannot work, similar to how your health controls your ability to work. Attempting to do business with an organization when its systems have crashed, Internet access is down, or wireless network is malfunctioning is very frustrating. When these types of issues occur, companies do not want to broadcast that they are experiencing technical difficulties because of hackers, an unpaid utility bill, or squirrels got into the data center and ate through all of the wires (yes, that has really happened).
How many times have you called a company and the customer service representative has stated that the system is down or that the system is really slow today? How many times have you missed submitting an assignment because your Internet service was down? Why is it important for an organization’s systems to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year? Why would a company hide the real reason that its systems are malfunctioning? What could happen if customers were informed that the systems were down due to hackers? How can an organization safeguard its systems?
PROJECT VIIEwaste Not, Want Not
On Earth Day every year many people, including corporate citizens, devote themselves to recycling and reducing, along with identifying items they can repurpose. Companies, such as Dell and Microsoft, two producers of materials that eventually become ewaste, have joined forces with an electronics recycling program run by Goodwill Industries International. Goodwill reports that the program has diverted about 96 million pounds in electronics from landfills.17
Assisting in a similar effort are office supply stores Office Depot and Staples that offer their own sorting and recycling services for used electronics. Apple has even jumped on this bandwagon, allowing customers to turn their old products in to retail locations when they buy something new.
There are so many opportunities to reduce ewaste. Make a list of how the popular technology manufacturers are already trying to reduce ewaste. Would starting a company that helped people locate used computers or other technologies for reuse be a worthwhile venture? Why or why not? Create a list of new alternatives any company could adopt to reuse, recycle, and reduce ewaste.
PROJECT VIIIOne Laptop Per Child
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project intends to create a $100 laptop for distribution to the world’s poorest children. The machine, called the OLPC or XO laptop, has a rubberized keyboard and an ultra-bright screen readable in daylight; when flipped, it converts to an electronic book reader. To keep the cost as low as possible (at $175 it is currently a bit more than the target), the computer has a host of free software and other tools to support learning opportunities. A special type of networking allows machines within a 100 feet or so to communicate with each other and relays a single Internet connection for them to use (where the Internet is available). The XO is targeted at communities where power generation is unreliable or nonexistent; it gets its power via a hand crank, pull cord, or foot pedal.18
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Do you agree that the One Laptop Per Child project will help educate children around the world? How does the XO computer provide learning opportunities for children in poor regions of the world? What issues could these children encounter if they have an XO laptop? How will cloud computing play an important role in the XO laptop, especially in terms of keeping costs low and data safe? What do you think the typical environment will be like where the XO laptop will be used? What issues will users of the XO laptop encounter that are not common in the United States? What can the creators of the XO laptop do to ensure its functionality even in the most extreme environments?
PROJECT IXVirtualizing Your Cell Phone
Virtualization is a challenging concept to understand. The formal definition is that it creates multiple virtual machines on a single computing device. OK, let’s try that again in English. Imagine you have three cell phones, one for the company you work for, one for a company you are starting on the side, and one for personal calls. For the most part, the phones are idle, and they seldom ever ring at the same time. Since the phones are idle the majority of the time, you notice that it is a waste of time and resources to support idle time, especially when you are paying for cell service on each phone. You decide to use virtualization to help your situation.
Essentially, this would put three virtual cell phones on one device. The individual services and applications for each phone would be independently stored on the one device. From the device’s perspective, it sees three virtual phones. This saves time and money in expenses and maintenance. You could even use virtualization to turn your cell phone into a scanner. Visit ScanR.com and, for just $5 a month, you can use the camera on your phone to scan documents. Take a photo of any document, business card, or whiteboard and upload it to ScanR’s website and in minutes, it is returned to you in a digital file. Could be helpful if your friend has to miss class and you want to copy your lecture notes.19
Virtualization is a hot topic these days because more and more businesses are focusing on social responsibility and attempting to find ways to reduce their carbon footprints. Create an analogy similar to the cell phone that demonstrates virtualization. What are the potential environmental impacts associated with virtualization? What are the business advantages of virtualization? What are the business risks associated with virtualization?
PROJECT XData Centers on the High Seas
Google is considering constructing a floating data center three to seven miles offshore that could be both powered and cooled by the ocean. It would consist of containers stacked with servers, data storage systems, and networking equipment on barges or other platforms and could be located close to users wherever it is not feasible, cost-effective, or efficient to build on land. Bringing the data closer to the user allows the data to arrive quicker. And since the ocean is a rent-free space, data centers can be as large as 100,000 square feet without real estate fees. The ocean can provide two critical factors that support a sustainable MIS infrastructure—water for cooling and power.20
What are the advantages and disadvantages of housing data centers in the ocean? Do you foresee any issues for these data centers with natural disasters? What types of security issues would Google encounter with a floating data center? Do you agree that it is good business sense to house a data center on a barge in the ocean? Why or why not?
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AYK APPLICATION PROJECTS
If you are looking for Excel projects to incorporate into your class, try any of the following after reading this chapter.
