COIS11011 Foundations of Business Computing

1. Discuss the five IT Megatrends that shape the Digital Future

The incorporation of the IT megatrends has a great impact on the digital area which is the main topic of discussion of this paper. The five different types of IT megatrends that shape the digital future are as followings:

• Changing means of access and consumption: One of the most significant IT trends which have an impact in the Digital futures is the extensive use of instantaneous platforms such as the social media for different kinds of activities such as the promotion, marketing and getting access to the systems.
• New technologies: The complexity of different organisation is significantly reduced after the incorporation of new IT technologies such as digital printing. These technologies are used to shape the existing production models (Bounfour, 2016). The economy landscape of the organisation is entirely revamped after the application of the new technologies.
• Increased used involvement: The employers of an organisation are given more opportunities to engage themselves in the creation and consumption of their services. Employers are given opportunities to be one of the most important stakeholders of an organisation by making them co-produce the services provided by the companies this really have a positive influence on the quality of services and ultimately fulfil the most important criteria of an organisation which is customer satisfaction.
• Shifting business models: Most of the global and medium sized corporations are discarding the primitive old-fashioned business models due to the rapid change in the market situation. The needs and requirements of the organisation is changing every day and this led the to the growth of optimised business models. The new business models are incorporated in to the system in such a way so that it is results in more productivity for the organisation.
• Copyright ownership: The fragmentation of the copyright ownership of different business modules are increasing everyday due to increased production of derivatives and the atomization of the services.

2. Of the five competitive forces presented in the Chapter 2 (Porter’s model), which is the mostsignificant for an organisation in terms of making IS investment decisions? Why? Which is the least significant? Why?

Among all the five forces of Porter’s model the threat coming from the new entrants is the most significant one. There are different types of reasons behind choosing this type as the most appropriate regarding any IS investment decisions. Every business organisation is associated with an area where they conduct their processes, with the extensive development in the field of IT numerous big, small or medium sized companies are coming to the market place. Those new corporations start their business with a much improved internal and external infrastructure along with the use of latest optimized business models (Matiin, Ratnawati & Riyadi, 2018). The quality of services provided by the new entrants is as good as the other reputed companies in the market. The entrance of a new entrant in the form of business rivals has the most impact regarding any major decision making strategies of the company. The business decision involving the IS have lot of issues revolved around it and the threat coming from the new entrants is the most significant one.

Among the rest of the porters five forces the threat coming from the substitute products and services is the least significant one. There are several reasons for choosing this category as the least significant one among the other forces. The quality of the products and services are generally evaluated by the quality assessment teams of the organisation, those quality assessment panels are regularly subjected to the advanced training sessions so that they are updated the current market trends and requirement (E. Dobbs, 2014). So it can be understood that the quality of product and services of every IS corporation is least dependent on the substitute services and products as the effective quality assessment panel can certainly make sure that the corporation main their quality services to their clients.

3. Which five Web sites do you visit most frequently? What makes you come back to these sites? Which ones do you spend most time on? Why?

The five mostly visited website that I visit on a regular basis are as followings:

• com
• com
• com
• com
• com

There are plenty of reasons behind the use of these most used websites but one of the prime reasons I keep on coming back to these websites is due to their quality of services. All the mentioned websites provides a great deal of service considering my requirements (Zhu & Liu, 2016). The user-friendliness of these websites is the other vital reasons why I keep coming back to these sites. Each of the sites have their own distinct characteristics and types of services and all of them have a knack of updating themselves according to the business area. The other reason why I keep coming back to these websites is the great user interface; all the mentioned domains have a unique and attractive interface which makes it look much better than the other websites. All of the mentioned websites have an enhanced search engine optimization sections which is the other reason why I keep on using these websites.

Among all the mentioned websites I spend most of my time on the YouTube.com website. I spend most of my time in this particular website due to their enhanced features such as the prediction of the searched items. For any type of activity such as studying any particular situation, listening to videos for any creative purposes, designing any programming language, watching a movie and lots uncountable purposes youtube.com can be used. This website can help us know about any data in a more creative way (Bi et al., 2014). Along with these activities like every regular social media platform this website can also be used effectively for business purposes. I have my own YouTube account from where I share my posts; the notification center of the YouTube is much more useful than the media websites. Browsing history can be accessed in a better way regarding this website along with the impressive subscription schemes regarding any big or small services.

4a. Search the Web for the most up-to-date statistics.

The above table represents the top 10 most up-to-date statistics regarding the top 10 Facebook pages. The first column of the table represents the ranking with ranks in ascending order from top to bottom. The second column of the table represents the Facebook pages active till now in the social networking world. These Facebook pages are a way by which the various businesses and the people are represented (Bakshy, Messing & Adamic, 2015). The third and the ultimate column represent the number of Facebook likes arranged in ascending order from top to bottom. These numbers represented here are in millions. The entire statistics is updated until April 2018. There are several other entities in the list but the top 10 ranking entities to make the information concise and effective. If seen closely it will be seen that these numbers are quite high as compared to other social networking websites.

4b What is striking/important about these statistics?

The statistics represented in a tabular form talks about the number of likes of the in the Facebook pages from different sources. These statistics are helpful in showing the Facebook pages with the most number of supporters (Seidman, 2013). During that particular month of April it is seen that Shakira had the eight most popular website on Facebook which is a giant in the world of internet and social networking. The statistics show that the Facebook page of Shakira acquired a total of 103.5 million likes on the social network from the supporters. Brand imaging is a serious aspect in the world of social networking, which is generally achieved through the help of maintaining a stable reputation and promotion in the society. On the top spot, it is seen that there is Facebook incorporation with like tally of 208.14 million. It proves that more people are being engaged towards using a social networking site and selecting Facebook as the prime source of that process (Toma & Hancock, 2013). These statistics is also striking because it helps to provide a fair idea about the revenue of each entity with the reflection in the number of likes.

4(c) How have the numbers changed since April 2016? Which categories seem to draw most attention in social networks? Why?

Since of April 2016 that statistics seems to have changed a lot both in the amount of popularity and also in the number of likes. It is evident that the ranks of the Facebook pages have shuffled a lot since April 2016 and depicts an increased number of likes in each of the Facebook pages (Sabate et. al., 2014). It is seen that Facebook for Every Phone has dropped two ranks and shifted to the third spot in the table while Facebook incorporation has moved from the second spot to acquire the topmost spot in the table. Although, all three Facebook, Facebook Sales Germany and Facebook for Every Phone has the same number of likes that is 208.14 million likes.

As inferred from the above statistics it is evident that Facebook and its services has acquired the top spots in the table of popularity (Bakshy, Messing & Adamic, 2015). The top three spots are acquired by the Facebook and its services because the social networking giant has grown substantially in the commercial market and also gained a lot of attention lately. Just after the Facebook and its services there is Samsung Mobile USA and Cristiano Ronaldo. It is due to the fact that people are loving the Samsung devices recently and also showing their great interest towards games like soccer.

5. Define a Database Management System (DBMS). What is an entity? Differentiate between records and attributes with example

The DBMS or the Data Base Management System is defined as the type of software which is required in the designing a database of a games, website or applications. The data involved in a particular website is effectively managed and organized with the help of the DBMS (Sumner, 2018). The different purposes of a DBMS are creation, definition, updating, query and administration of database. The different standards by which DBMS can share their data are ODBC, JDBC, MySQL and SQL. The two broad categories of the DBMS are the relational databases and the non-relational databases.

The entity is defined as the type of real world object which is either animate or inanimate; the foremost determination of using an entity is to give identity to the concerned objects. Essential data and information are stored in the entities. Entities are sometimes found in sets in a DBMS. The entity type is defined as the fundamental building block foe describing the structure of data associated with the entity data model (Dignös et al., 2016). The entities used in the backend codes of the amazon website is like the top-level concept having the set of prices and order details such as the quantity, colour, shapes and sizes regarding any specific product.

The identification of the differences between the records and attributes in DBMS is the concern regarding this unit of the paper. Records are defined as the type of fields having specific information regarding one item. The amazon.com can give the readers of this document a great view of the records (Kennedy, 2016). The valid user of that website has a personal account having features such as the recent orders, deliver address and personal information such as telephone number, all these information are stored and accessed using the name of the users which is an active example of records in DBMS.

Attribute is defined as a component of a DBMS in the form of a database field or a table. The functionality of the attributes is to describe the instances in the row of a database. The key attributes used in the DBMS are Primary key, secondary key and super key (Arulraj, Perron & Pavlo, 2016). The other types of attributes used in DBMS are atomic attribute, stored attribute, derived attribute and null valued attribute.

6. Write a short note on the rise of ‘Enterprise Systems’.

This section of the paper will be discussing on the importance of the rise of software package known as the enterprise systems. The rise of the enterprise systems is mainly due to its significant characterised features which facilitates the improvement of various functions in an organisation by integration (Li & Wang, 2015). It is most suitable for organisation which has different departments and they all working under the same facility. The extensive growth and development in the field in the field of information technology led to the growth of advanced large scale applications and enterprise system is one of them. There are different types of functionalities associated with an enterprise system in a business environment such as the information flows, reporting, data analytics. The different types of enterprise systems used in a business organization such as automated billing systems, customer relationship management systems, business intelligence systems and enterprise resource planning (Arai et al., 2014). The reason behind the rise of these enterprise systems are the low operational cost, higher efficiency, workload reductions, increased control and governance.

7(a) Whose responsibility is it to ensure that algorithms are not discriminatory? Explain.

To foster in the world of business it is essential to implement a successful Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The customers are sole assets of a company who defines the company’s growth in the future scope of the business market. To successfully lead a growing business, it is very essential to implement project management along with an integration of the Customer Relationship Management or CRM (Khodakarami & Chan, 2014). The roles and responsibilities of CRM is to establish a strong relationship of the company with its loyal and new customers. The CRM often facilitates this process with the help of providing with advertisements in accordance to the preference of the customers. However, in course of doing so it is often seen that adverts and promotions are targeted to specific customers for maintaining a stable range of profitability for the company. This specific targeting of the promotions leads to a sense of biasness. The CRM algorithms leads to customer discriminations (Klinner & Walsh, 2013). Although it is, the responsibility of the Customer Relationship Manager to ensure that there exist no customer discriminations as these discriminations may affect the company in adverse way by a loss of customers especially the new ones who may have been drawn towards the adverts had if they were targeted towards them as well.

7(b) Google, Facebook, and many other widely used software platforms have been accused of using algorithms that present biased search results or news feeds. Should such platforms be bias free (at least as much as possible), or is it acceptable for platforms to reflect the biases of the developers? Explain.

Both Google and Facebook are giant platforms in the world of internet and its services. While Facebook is the most used social networking platform in the present conditions, the Google is the most widely preferred search engines due to the quick responses and other added services. There are several other software platforms that are almost as big as these two software platforms. However, there have been accusations in both the past and the present that these platforms are not implementing effective CRM to their services (Saarijärvi, Karjaluoto, & Kuusela, 2013). As a result of which the CRM algorithms are leading to a sense partiality in the customer preferences and discriminating among the customers (Sweeney, 2013). Based on the customer preferences, the CRM of these giant software platforms are targeting the customers through which the business can be facilitated. In simple terms, they are violating the notion of providing unbiased information to all the customers availing their service that falls in the category of an ethical dilemma as the profit of the company is related to it. Whatever may be the case, it should always be remembered that all the customers are the prime assets of the company and serving them should always be the prime objective. However, it is acceptable to stick to the minimum limitations of biasness for developing the services.

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