Project Deliverable 2: Business Requirements

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Project Deliverable 1: Project Plan Inception

Jessica Hill

Dr. Jan Felton

CIS 590: Directed Research Project

January 18, 2015

Background Information

WebFOCUS is an innovative internet based company that acquires its funds from a small group of shareholders and entrepreneurs. The corporation came into existence in March of 2010. The company went live with close beta. Later, they opened registration through email request. This company provides users with a facility to display what they are about. The users can create, manipulate, sort, upload and manage images with the internet based company. It is a personalized display place for media content (Divitini, & Brasethvik, 1999).  The company offers facilities of visual discovery. It also provides sharing, collecting and storage of visual tools. The user creates a board and then selects an item, website or page and pins it to the board. The client can save and share these pins. These boards can be used to make projects or to merge data and pictures together (Divitini, & Brasethvik, 1999).  The company manages it’s working with the help of operational systems and the data of the users is maintained through relational databases. A user creates a personal pin board where he displays images of his interest and information about the images displayed and is maintained in the database of the company for future reference (Divitini, & Brasethvik, 1999). 

Details of Business Activities of the Company

Business activities are carried out in order to generate profit. One of the means of making profit includes charging advertisers. The company places off sponsored pins on category pages or individual profiles which influences other users. Advertisers pay for such pins. The company carries out branded campaigns. Several brands create pages and place their products which represent their brands. Thus, revenue is generated through the respective brands. There are companies like Outbrain which provide aid to publishers in making money. This is done by directing visitors to other sites. The company makes profit through charging the e-commerce partners too (Divitini, & Brasethvik, 1999).  Revenue can easily be collected by charging for the company’s membership or for transactions. The company offers a special section of its site which acts like a marketplace. The internet based company creates a customer to the customer marketplace. In this case, it acts like a medium of communication between two consumers and charges fees for it. The customer can sell their products to other customers by using this medium. The internet based company can also make earnings by generating its own products. The company receives basic information of the demands of customers through their pins. It can generate its own services for fulfilling the needs of customers and charge them for it. Turnover is also generated by charging business to business partners. Data can be packaged and sell to advertisers and retailers who care about the needs of customers.

Speculations on Outsourcing and Offshoring Opportunities

Opportunities are outsourced when the company can get them done at a lesser cost. When outsourcing is done, the company only pays a fraction of amount for it and the pain of fulfilling the task under the given payment is what customer bears. It also gives opportunity of having a following workforce which never ends (Olsen, 2006). When work is outsourced, a wide-ranging documentation of the software should be made. This way, the customer will be able to give best results on the work taken under consideration. Before outsourcing any project, the company should always explain to its staff the reason why it is being outsourced. This will ease any doubt about the project to the staff. The company should make provisions for retaining its employees with outsourcing. If a company has a reputation in outsourcing then lesser employees sign up for it. Hence, employees with skills in high demand should be retained at any cost. When deciding for outsourcing, the work should be monitored. If it is not done, then the company will have no basic knowledge of the project (Olsen, 2006). It is also difficult to manage globally distributed employees. The workers belong to different geographic locations and cultures which makes it difficult to manage them. Also in case of natural disasters, no guarantee of work is assured. Offshoring is the phenomenon in which groups from different locations of world combine and work out together. It helps in the way that the time difference of working groups at different geographic locations can be both advantageous and disadvantageous (Olsen, 2006). When one group is asleep, the other can continue working. On the other hand, it can lead to communication differences which can be created when there is an urgent need to discuss some part of project. Offshoring also accounts for problems such as that of cultural differences and language barrier. The teams under offshoring have lives of their own. Their environmental differences can lead to different assumptions being made by different teams which can hinder the growth of the work. Generally, high turnover is not easy with offshoring opportunities. If the offshore group is good at one thing, it does not ensure that it will carry out all the other works also with same efficiency (Olsen, 2006). Offshoring can also generate hidden costs for the company when giving out such opportunities. The hidden cost here includes: cost of telephone calls, web-based meetings which are an essential requirement of any project work, and video conferences, which can be needed in order to facilitate efficient conversation (Olsen, 2006). Data in offshoring also gets lost due to translation. The language barrier generates a need for efficient translation. This process takes time which results in loss of data which would have been essential for project development (Olsen, 2006).

Current Information System

The operational systems used by WebFOCUS to support its business include Microsoft Windows and Linux. Microsoft Windows is a powerful tool that provides an effective graphical user interface which makes working easy for its users. On the other hand, Linux is an open source operating system which can be circulated and customized by anyone. The company uses relational databases to store files. This works on the basis of the relational model. The data is arranged in tables in the form of rows and columns and can easily be sorted with the help of a unique key meant for each row. The relational database works on CODD’s rules and uses structured query language for carrying out queries in database and for maintaining data too (Elmasri & Navathe, 2011).  Data warehouses are used for accumulation and analysis of data. The extract-transform-load based data warehouse is used by company. It uses staging and data integration techniques. It maintains history of data and improves data quality. Data from multiple sources in integrated in a data warehouse. It also provides a single general data model for storage of entire data (Elmasri & Navathe, 2011).   Cloud computing is the technique in which several remote servers and software networks are interconnected. It facilitates the central storage of data. It also provides access to computer services and resources online. According to requirement, the company can build up private, public, or hybrid cloud for the same. A private cloud is operated only for a single organization either internally or in an external mode. A public cloud provides services over a public network. A hybrid cloud is an integration of two or more clouds together. These clouds are individual in nature but are bound together in some manner (Elmasri & Navathe, 2011).  Virtualization enables the facility to run on many virtual environments. The company uses it through Linux in which a visitor can run in the environment provided by the existing software (Elmasri & Navathe, 2011).  Network infrastructure and security is ensured with the help of different factors such as: firewall, multiple levels of authentication and application security, which is achieved with the help of secure coding techniques and antivirus software. Intrusion detection systems can also be installed in order to prevent the entry of unauthorized users. Such systems generate an alarm when an unauthorized person tries to enter the premises of the secure zone (Elmasri & Navathe, 2011). 

References:

Divitini, M., & Brasethvik, T. (1999). Internet-based organizational memory and knowledge

management. D. G. Schwartz (Ed.). IGI Global.

Elmasri, R. & Navathe, S (2011). Fundamentals of database systems. Addison-Wesley.

Olsen, K.B (2006). “Productivity impacts of Offshoring and Outsourcing: A Review”,

OECDScience, Technology and Industry Working Papers, 2006/1, OECD Publishing.