Contents

Introduction21.Answer to Question 132.Answer to Question 2 53. Answer to Question 384. Answer to Question 4155. Bibliography176. Marking Scheme and Comments19

IntroductionThe digital age is already with us and it serves us, as professionals working in various industries in Sri Lanka, to study about the importance of Information Systems for Management Professionals. In fact, as continuously learning and improving students, we have to be in touch with the world around us and have to be aware of the changes that take place in the cyber landscape. Moreover, it serves us well if we study in a rigorous manner how it helps us to make our business processes easier and also to find more ways in which we can use it in our day-to-day business activities.This collection of writings consists of answers to the Take-Home Assignment of the module MCP1601 Management Information Systems of the CEMBA course. This is a part of assignments for Cohort No. 10.

1.Answer to Question 1IntroductionBusiness Pressures are the changes in a businesss social, technological, legal, economic, physical and political environments that creates the requirement to change the strategies or business processes that the particular business uses or otherwise face the unpleasing scenarios of losing market share, customers and eventually the very existence of the business itself. Business pressures are numerous in our modern business world and every company should adapt to these situations, or these drives that mandate change. In response to these driving forces, businesses implement measures that can be reactive or, if planned and implemented before-hand, proactive. These are known as Critical Response Activities. These will be responses like adopting new strategic management principles, implementing unique customer-focused processes, adopting continuous improvement methodologies or adopting new modes of conducting business such as E-Commerce. In the following sections we will identify the business pressures that were the driving forces behind the critical response activities that were implemented by Le Saunda Holding Company (Hong Kong) and the The Dallas Mavericks (U.S.A).Le Saunda Holding Company (Hong Kong)Le Saundas critical response activities fall under the categories of Stretegic Management and Systems and Restructuring Business Processes. The major business pressure on Le Saunda is more internal than external. The growing size of the company meant that the financial and logistics divisions had to handle huge amounts of data. As such, it becomes difficult to manage such vast amounts of data without the ability to number-crunch or analyze and present useful information from them. That is the reason that they, in response, adopted a new sophisticated accounting software package. This gave them advantages such as being able to expedite accounting processes and the functional managers in turn being able to make better, quicker and more informed decisions. So the major business pressure was Information Overload driven by the rapid growth of the company.The secondary business pressure was the Need for Real-Time operations. Implementation of the accounting software package gave the benefit for the functional managers and top-level management to obtain data very quickly, at most, within the course of a day. The Dallas Mavericks (U.S.A)The major Business Pressure behind the Mavericks implementation of their many critical response activities was Market pressure. In other words, they wanted to fill seats. The NBA has a big fan-base, but if all the fans decided to stay at home and watch the games on television, that meant a loss for the stadium or the game venue organizers. This is the reason why they implemented internet access for the processing facility to facilitate availing refreshments with a lot of convenience for the fans. In brief, they needed to attract the fans to watch the game live at the venue itself.Other Business Pressures were the Need for Real-Time operations and Technological Innovation. The Mavericks managed the former by implementing the method of using handheld computing devices to track the referees behavioral patterns and inform the players of any bias or favored decisions. They managed the latter, of technological innovation by implementing web streaming of their games and the digital Content Management System for the use of the coaches.

2.Answer to Question 2

Report on the transformation of a Traditional Business to an e-Business as compared to the approach of Siemens AG Lessons to be learnedIntroductionIn the global economy of the present digital age, competition among peer businesses is fierce, almost suicidal (pun intended), so much so that giant companies like Kodak and Blockbuster Video eventually had to file for bankruptcy (Miles, T., 2014). This was because of the simple reason that they failed to change their business processes to suit the changing market place, which was rapidly becoming all digital and offered many of their customers services via the Web, such as streaming in this case for Blockbuster Video. In this wake, Siemens AGs transformation to an e-business was timely and effective for the company. Therefore, analyzing this transformation serves as a guideline for assessing the feasibility of such a transformation for a traditional company and also to enumerate its pros and cons.Siemens AG, being a multi-national Engineering and Electronics group of companies, has had a lot of competition, even from the whole of the last century. Companies like General Electric, ABB, Mitsubishi, Alstom, Schneider and Areva have been its major competitors for many years and have almost had major shares in all the industry market areas that Siemens was engaged with. However, the early 1990s brought an even playing ground to this market with the advent of electronic commerce. This was the time when Siemens decided that it had to catch on with the rest of the world and ride along with the new digital age of doing business. Siemens Strategies and Lessons to LearnSiemens went through a lot of business competition. The following sections will describe what they did to counteract them and the lessons that we can learn from them.

Employees Coordination and Knowledge SharingSiemens implemented network technology to connect their employees via a company intranet. This enabled better coordination between individuals and teams, timely dissemination of instructions and data, and better knowledge sharing. Furthermore, its implementation of a central corporate knowledge base meant that their employees did not have to re-invent the wheel every time a new project or problem crept up. So it is obvious that networking your employees and creating a resource / knowledge sharing medium is actually good for any company.Collaboration with Suppliers and CustomersSiemens used SAP R/3 and other related software products to manage the problem of their supply chain and handling its suppliers and customers. Enterprise Application Software systems such as SAP (now in its later versions such as SAP ERP 6.0) definitely help large companies organize and manage their supply chains better by being able to handle raw material, logistics, and being able to connect with the companys supply chain partners.Siemens also implemented Web-based systems and e-commerce applications to connect with its suppliers and customers to make procurements online and to take in purchase orders online as well. This is definitely a cost effective and time saving approach to reach out to a companys stakeholders. Any business is sure to benefit by implementing Web-based systems to interconnect. However, for a large company or a conglomerate, it seems even mandatory in this age.Reduction of Overhead and Process CostsMigrating to an e-commerce infrastructure directly reduces overhead costs and is particularly advisable to a large organization. Siemenss implementation has proven this.Siemens also used Business Process Standardization to re-engineer their business processes so that there were little inter-process-variables among its many business processes. This permitted the migration of its e-commerce applications among its business processes easy. This also reduces material/labor wastage as they can be reused across business processes as they have standard requirements and practices. Standardization is also a mandatory business practice that should be done by all businesses. Increasing Customer ServiceFor a business, it is very important that you keep the existing customer base while expanding it. Siemens reached out to its customers through the Web. This provided easy access to Siemens services and Siemens could also easily reach its customers. In fact, implementing communications between an organization and its customers, particularly via Web-Based methods and Extra-nets is a very efficient solution for a large business to reach out to its customers. Siemens has implemented this well. It is advisable for all large businesses to follow suit.ConclusionWhat Siemens did, to describe it in a few words, is to totally transform itself into an e-business. For a large company like Siemens it is the only way to survive in this very competitive digital age. Whats more, its competitors such as GE, Schneider and others have done the same. Since we can see that even though the cost of implementation is somewhat high for a migration as such, its pros definitely outweigh its cost. Anyway, a company or conglomerate of that scale and competing in Siemens Engineering market will not survive long if it did not.

3.Answer to Question 33.1Answer to Question 3 (a)Introduction After the introduction of the World Wide Web to the world by CERN computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at the start of the last decade of the 20th century, web technology has grown so much that it has gradually become an integral part of our lives. The web browser has become the de-facto interface to network with our peers around the world and also as a news portal and a versatile research tool. The Web has also become a very important tool in modern corporate organizations. We will see in the following sections, by examining five examples in the corporate world, the role of the Web in this integration of the Web and organizational activities and what benefits it has for the organizations.Case 1We will first focus on a report where Business Wire (2014a) reported that Nevadas Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (NCET) had awarded a small-business insurance company called EMPLOYERS as its software company of the year. They were recognized with this award for its web based product EACCESS, an industry-first of its kind, for being an online portal, which streamlines and automates the processes independent insurance agents use to generate insurance quotes and manage their clients accounts (Business Wire, 2014a). It uses the latest web-based and also mobile based technologies to ease the workload of its insurance agents. The web-based services provide a fully automated agent-less insurance scheme quoting procedure by also providing a dashboard with all the possible options for customizing and tailoring the scheme to suit the applicant. The agents can access all this information from its centralized and cloud-based Content Management System (CRM). As the CRM is cloud-based, the agents can access the content from anywhere with a laptop over its web interface or with a smart phone with its mobile application. The remarkable thing about EACCESS is that at its inception it helped the organization so much in sharing knowledge and collaboration so well that more than a technology roll-out, it became a major driver of new collaborations and internal partnerships that have bolstered EMPLOYERS organizational culture (Business Wire, 2014a). Since the company deployed the product initially among its own employees they were able to reduce and improve on the software development cycle time by getting rapid feedback from its own employees and being able to assess their prototype(s) in a production environment that was inside their own organization. As the insurance agent does not have to be available in person with the insurance applicant, it directly improves the productivity of the agent by availing him or her of more time to attend to other activities. As for the client, it gives a lot of flexibility by being able to gauge the benefits of the scheme against the premium by selecting different options of the scheme from the web-dashboard and being able to generate quotes online and almost instantly. Remarkably, internationalization of their web portal greatly benefits the process by being availing the use of the portal to many non-native speakers of English. This reduces mistakes that can be made by the interaction of an English-only speaking agent and a non-native speakers of English providing a quality, albeit an automated assessment of the clients needs. In effect this provides a greater opportunity for this portal to be used without restrictions of language and geography.Case 2The second case we will focus on is a report by the same online press release distribution site Business Wire (2014b) which details on a web-based product that the judiciary courts can use to let self-represented litigants (or in other words, litigants who have no lawyers but represent themselves at a court case) complete court forms and file cases online. The web-based Guide & File application by software company Tyler Technologies which specializes in providing software solutions to local governments, enables courts to take all of the courts information systems, databases, knowledge, statutes, rules and more, and put it in a format that people unfamiliar with the court system can understand (Business Wire, 2014b). Not only this, but court systems all around the states of the U.S. where they have embraced this technology can now share their knowledge-base in a distributed fashion enabling timely access to all resources. It also reduces the time a self-representing litigant needs to file the case and also provides him/her with timely access and research material to find precedents and familiar cases applicable to the case in question.

Case 3The third case where web-technology has enabled an organization can be seen by the report from The Wall Street Journal (2014). It details a software product known as Energov by the same software company that we talked about in the second case in the previous paragraph, Tyler Technologies. Energov is a Planning, Permitting & Licensing Solution designed for local/state governments that will see the conversion of the state of the states legacy planning solution by phasing-out and by eventually replacing it with the new product Energov. This web based automation solution streamlines permitting processes while improving workflow management, business processes and customer service, and provides online access to employees and citizens (The Wall Street Journal, 2014). It will feature a centralized database which will be updated real-time and permits sharing knowledge across all modules with appropriate access permissions. Energov integrated mobile accessibility to this system through mobile applications permitting the city staff to access the system in real-time while they will be working out in the field. The citizens will also be able to access the services that the local government provides via mobile apps. This makes the tedious manual work of queuing processes for permits to be obtained that are customary for traditional public organizations obsolete. In essence, the permitting and regulatory process that we can see in normal local government institutions such as the local municipal or provincial councils can be automated and streamlined. Even the many inter-departmental processes can be automated and the permitting and regulatory work can be expedited because all the data will be accessible via a central database to all the parties that need the data.Case 4Our fourth case study will focus on a report from the online portal of popular magazine Business Week (2014). It reports of technology giant Sony Corporations plans of deploying a web-based television service in the U.S. in 2014. The interesting thing here is that Sony already has a considerable market share in their products from the Sony PlayStation to their wide range of televisions. Since all their Playstations are web-enabled giving them a potential installed-base for web-enabled Sony products of approximately 70 million (Business Week, 2014), Sony is planning to deploy their new web-based television service on PlayStations at the onset. The special feature about their television service that sets it apart from many other competitors is that it will let the consumer choose between live TV streams and on-demand programs. One can argue whether this holds any benefits to the Sony Corporation to function as an organization as a whole. Sony already has its own network of cable TV streams. It also has its own Sony Film and TV Studios. When this new web-based TV service comes into operation, it gets the benefit of being able offer their digital entertainment content on-demand to the services subscribing customers generating extra revenue. The initial target base of 70 million Sony PlayStation and web enabled smart device customers will generate a further revenue by getting nominal subscriptions to their live television streaming service. It will also integrate the Sony Computer Entertainment company as a whole bringing its disparate divisions of cable TV services, film studios, PlayStation network and smart phones and tablets together by offering an integrated entertainment experience through this new digital Content Delivery mechanism which they are trying to implement through their new web-based television service.Case 5Our fifth and final case for the role of the web in an organization will be based on a report from Business Wire (2014c). It is about Printer Manufacturer and value-added Point-of-Sale solution provider Epson delivering its new ePOS technology. The gist of this technology can be learned from Business Wire (2014c):Its ePOS technology can manage printing in any environment (mobile, web/cloud-based and legacy), while also enabling the Epson OmniLink smart devices to serve as peripheral connectivity hubs for mobile and cloud/browser-based POS .. with mobile applications, such as online ordering, mobile self-service, mobile device management, and mobile POS all working seamlessly with Epsons ePOS technology on a variety of Epson solutions.At its launch atthe National Retail Federations 103rdAnnual Convention and Expo(Business Wire, 2014c), Epson partnered with six different suppliers and service providers all offering diverse products and services. For example, partnering with anyGuest.com food can be ordered by customers through the web page of anyGuest.com via any web enabled mobile phone or PC and EPSONs ePOS solution will ensure that the order will be directly routed the kitchen where the ePOS enabled terminal will be placed. In another case, Raymark uses its Mosaic POS system on an Apple iPad 2 to directly send data over Bluetooth to EPSONs mobile receipt printers. This integration provides specialty retailers with extensive POS functionality, including sales, customer profiles, loyalty and promotions, discounts, voids, tendering, and the ability to suspend and retrieve transactions on any mobile device or fixed workstation (Business Wire, 2014c) all through web-based ePOS technology.As we can see, this web-based ePOS technology brings Point-of-Sales technology to a whole new level integrating services across the retail organization. A retail agent can, for example, listen to a customers requirements, search their database online for the products, accept payments via credit card and issue a receipt print directly to a printer all the while working only on his tablet PC / iPad. In other words, EPSON and its partners have made POS terminals mobile all the way.

3.2Answer to Question 3 (b)As a person who is involved in the engineering and technical fields, my interests business-wise lie mainly in electrical and networking businesses and suppliers. Due the growing business pressures of the business environments in which these companies exist, they have been forced to adopt new, radical, innovative and un-tested business models. Often, we can see that they do indeed create many opportunities for businesses as they provide a niche business model in the first place and gradually, the customers get more and more attracted to these new ideas/models. The very nature of humans is to seek change. Applying new business models to their businesses revolves around this human trait to succeed.For instance, ABB, an electrical-equipment manufacturing company based in Germany, Switzerland and Sweden is now a key player in the Electric Vehicle (EV) market. We will be referring to an online white-paper by Langezaal, M. and Bouman, C. (2011). Their business model revolves around the EV charging value chain. ABB envisions the existing infrastructure, that of generation and distribution of electricity as it already exists, coupled with a two new elements the infrastructure owner and the charging system operator (Langezaal, M. and Bouman, C., 2011, p. 3). The key element that will tie these players together will be the use of Information Technology (IT). The use of IT lies in being able to modularize the elements in the service chain and make the options configurable for the consumer in that he/she can chose which operator to use based on the cost and type of services that they offer. All this information will be readily available to the consumer as well as the other stakeholders in this EV charging value change because of the enabling factor of IT.The stakeholders in this value chain will be able to negotiate prices and/or throttle their outputs to control price/demand. This is necessitated by the fact that electricity prices vary by time of usage and also by the quantity of usage. So this whole value chain becomes a veritable eco-system of its own. The beauty of this business model by ABB is that it supports a stable infrastructure and service chain for the EV consumers thus creating a positive outlook for the potential buyers of this product. Not only does this keep up the sales, but the consumers also benefit in the long run by being able to access and find charging stations anywhere, just like normal petrol/diesel stations are so ubiquitous today. It will also become evident that this method of performing business cannot be directly defined in terms of our traditional e-commerce business models. However, it does seem to have some traits of a Business-to-Business (B2B) model, as the parties involved in the electricity generation, distribution infrastructure owners and EV charging center operators do have to perform business similar to a B2B model. At the end, what does ABB really do in this value chain? They will mold their marketing strategies to promote this new kind of business model. They will provide the necessary IT model to the stakeholders involved and will also market their electrical equipment necessary to make this model viable, i.e. charging terminals for the charging stations and distribution automation solutions for the distribution infrastructure owners. In fact, ABB stands to derive a huge benefit from this model at all points of operation of its stakeholders as they all use ABB products indirectly.

4.Answer to Question 4

Report on the latest trends in the Digital AgeIntroductionThe new digital age, the cyber realm of the present (as of 2014) can verily be identified as the age of big-data. So many things revolve around being able collect and analyze massive amounts of data. Google, Yahoo, Bloomberg and numerous other such big-data companies are evidence for this. A brief overview can be gotten form Digital Enterprise (2009a) on how Digital Markets are driven and enabled by big-data providers to streamline their business processes. (However, it seems that the DigitalEnterprise.org website has not been kept up-to-date, so we will be just using the concepts presented therein and reference from updated sites on the Web). Another important item to discuss will be Digital Automata as can be seen from Digital Enterprise (2009b) which discusses the abililty to automate the things we do on the Internet and generally, on a computing platform.Big DataTo understand the power of this concept we must be able to appreciate this concept fully. Quoting from Schnberger and Cukier (2013, p. 6),because internet companies could collect vast troves of data and had a burning financial incentive to make sense of them, they became the leading users of the latest processing technologies, superseding offline companies that had, in some cases, decades more experience.Such is the power of data. Google with its pay-per-click and AdSense Google Analytics concepts utilizes this approach to give marketers the profiles of its search engine users. Facebook leverages the same power of big data and being able to profile their users via their activities on their social interactive medium such as clicking Like on certain pages. They too in turn market this information to online businesses. At the same time, companies like IBM are making solutions for the businesses on how to leverage these big data troves on its own (Fast Company, 2014).Digital AutomataDigital Automata revolves around making lives easier for businesses as well as the online consumers by utilizing various technologies such as the Semantic Web and Autonomic Computing. Semantic WebThe Semantic Web uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to model data interchange on the Web (W3, 2014). This allows to link data elements together by logical meaning via a labeled graphing method. This allows search engines, for example, derive meaning for a search term with more meaning rather than just relying on textual data search methods which were the norm when search engines first came into existence. The bigger picture is that in the end, data engineering can bring more meaning by letting web pages be linked in a logical manner rather that only by direct web links, i.e. hyper-text. The end result will make data easier to manage, data can be re-used effectively, tasks involving data manipulation can be automated and above all, for a business, the employees will become efficient and waste less of their time trying to find data manually.Autonomic ComputingTo learn about Autonomic Computing, perhaps the best place to start is with IBM as they are the pioneers of this field. Autonomic Computing is about computing systems where they require very low amounts of human interaction and own their own, have the abilities of self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting (IBM, 2002). As can be readily discerned, the administrative costs and the overall IT management costs will be very less as human intervention is minimal. This is not just a conceptual idea. IBM have already implemented these concepts in their products, i.e. the DB2 family of Database products (IBM, 2013). This system actually allows you to initially set the parameters for continuous health monitoring of the system core components, self-tuning its memory, automatic storage options, automatic storage, compression, automatic database backups, automatic re-organization and even auto-configuration commands

5.BibliographyBUSINESS WEEK. (2014) Sony Plans Web-Based Television Service in U.S. This Year (2). [Online] Available from: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-01-08/sony-plans-web-based-television-service-in-u-dot-s-dot-this-year-1 [Accessed: 19th April 2014]BUSINESS WIRE. (2014a) EMPLOYERS Named Software Company of the Year by Nevadas Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. [Online] Available from: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140324005238/en/EMPLOYERS%C2%AE-Named-Software-Company-Year-Nevada%E2%80%99s-Center [Accessed: 12th April 2014]BUSINESS WIRE. (2014b) Tyler Technologies Launches Odyssey Guide & File Solution. [Online] Available from: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140409005329/en/Tyler-Technologies-Launches-Odyssey-Guide-File-Solution [Accessed: 16th April 2014]BUSINESS WIRE. (2014c) Epson Partners Showcase Mobile and Web-Based Printing with Epsons ePOS Technology. [Online] Available from: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140113005193/en/Epson-Partners-Showcase-Mobile-Web-Based-Printing-Epson%E2%80%99s [Accessed: 19th April 2014]DIGITAL ENTERPRISE (2009a) Digital Markets. [Online] Available from: http://digitalenterprise.org/markets/markets.html [Accessed: 21st April 2014]DIGITAL ENTERPRISE (2009b) Digital Automata. [Online] Available from: http://digitalenterprise.org/automata/automata.html [Accessed: 21st April 2014]EMPLOYERS. (2014) EACCESS for Agents EMPLOYERS Insurance. [Online] Available from: http://www.employers.com/agents/eAccess_Connect.aspx [Accessed: 12th April 2014]FAST COMPANY. (2014) The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Big Data [Online] Available from: http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2014/industry/big-data [Accessed: 21st April 2014]IBM. (2002) Autonomic Computing [Online] Available from: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/tivoli/autonomic.html [Accessed: 21st April 2014]IBM. (2013) IBM DB2 Version 10.5 Information Center [Online] Available from: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v10r5/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.db2.luw.welcome.doc%2Fdoc%2Fwelcome.html [Accessed: 21st April 2014]LANGEZAAL, M. AND BOUMAN, C (2011). Towards Winning Business Models for the EV-Charging Industry - Who plays this game, what are the rules and why IT is one of the most important competences in this industry. [Online] Available from: http://www05.abb.com/global/scot/scot344.nsf/veritydisplay/472865366f28bfc9c1257990003fbda2/$file/4evc200801-aren_towardswinningbusinessmodels.pdf [Accessed: 22nd April 2014]MILES, T. (2014) 3 Epic Fails From Giant Companies (And What We Can Learn From Them). [Online] Available from: http://www.webbroi.com/blog/3-epic-fails-from-giant-companies-and-what-we-can-learn-fromhtml [Accessed: 22nd April 2014]SCHNBERGER V. M. AND CUKIER K. (2013). Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing CompanyWALL STREET JOURNAL. (2014) Kansas City, Mo., Signs $5.8 Million Contract with Tyler Technologies for its EnerGov Planning, Permitting & Licensing Solution. [Online] Available from: http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20140414-906324.html [Accessed: 19th April 2014]W3. (2014) Resource Description Framework (RDF). [Online] Available from: http://www.w3.org/RDF/ [Accessed: 21st April 2014]

6.Marking Scheme and Comments

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