Business Application Software

Choosing the Computer Hardware

2010-08-24T01:10:00.001-07:00

Choosing the Computer Hardware
With the bewildering array of hardware which is available, it is often difficult to decide upon what to select.

In addition, most of us are concerned about cost and it is easy to get caught with all the sales-hype in computer store.

When choosing a computer for business, the first thing to ask is: what are are you going to use it for?

It is only for word processing or are you going to use it for invoicing or accounting?

One we have an idea of immediate needs, program (software) needed can be selected.

Then need to know the requirements:

How much memory will they require
Are special computer boards required in computer
Will it need a modern to connect to the internet via a phone line or cable connection.
How powerful a computer needed
How fats it will have to be

Choosing the Computer Hardware

Information As a Resource

2010-07-17T07:55:00.000-07:00

Information As a Resource
Information is a corporate resource, like other resources such as capital equipment, raw material or finance.

In law, information, such as product designs, best sellers and computer programs, is classed as intellectual property.

It requires effort and expense to produce, and has value because copies of it can be sold.

The courts recognize the rights of ownership and are prepared to protect them. But information is different from, say, capital equipment because a particular machine can only manifest itself once, and copies are almost as difficult to make as the original, whereas a software program or a novel can be reproduced easily, million as of times if necessary.

In fact the marginal cost of providing one extra copy of an information product across the internet to a customer is actually close to zero.

Information can be categorized according to its market value. Broadly there are three types of information:

Information for sale, such as software that can be used, or news that informs or a video or novel that entertains. This is usually privately owned, and access to it is sold by the owner at the market price. Often it has a limited shelf-life its value declining with time.
Information for free,, such as train and passenger jet timetables’, provided by the owners, because it is in their interest to do so. Other examples are advertisement, product prices and specification. Users, though, will often choose to pay for easy access via cell phones, the internet and specialist magazines.
Information for internal use by organization, such as customer data, work schedules, sales forecast, budgets and minutes of meetings. It is difficult to value, as there is no legal market. However, the cost of losing it through fire or computer catastrophe can be fatal: most companies never recover from a major loss, and close within two years.

Information As a Resource

Business Application Software

2010-06-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

Business Application Software
Early software typically performed a single function. Today, however integrated software combines many functions in a single package.

Integrated packages allow for the easy linking of ext, numerical data, graphs, photos, and even audiovisual clips.

A business report prepared using the Microsoft Office package for instance, can conclude all these components.

Integration offers at least two others benefits. Once date have been entered into an application in an integrated package, the data can be used in another integrated package without having to reenter the data again.

Also, once a user learns one application, it is much easier to learn another application in an integrated package.
Business Application Software

Early History of Computing Hardware

2010-04-28T22:54:00.000-07:00

Early History of Computing Hardware
Many people believe that Stonehenge the famous collection of rock monoliths in Great Britain, is an early form of calendar or astrological calculator.

The abacus which appeared n the sixteenth century BC, was developed as an instrument to record numeric values and on which a human can perform basic arithmetic.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, built and sold gear- driven mechanical machines, which performed whole number addition and subtraction.

Later in the seventeenth century, a German mathematician, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, built the first mechanical device designed to do all four whole number operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Unfortunately, the state of mechanical gears and levers at that time was such that the Leiniz machine was not very reliable.

In the late eighteenth century, Joseph Jacquard developed what became known as Jacquard’s loom, used for weaving cloth. The loom used a series of cards with holes punched in them to specify the used of specific colored thread and therefore dictate the design that was woven into the cloth.

Although not a computing device, Jacquard’s loom was the forts to make use of an important form of input: the punched card.

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the next major step was taken this time by a British mathematician, Chares Babbage designed what he called his analytical engine.

His design was too complex for him to build with the technology of his day, so it was never implemented.

His vision however, included many of the important component of today’s computer.

Babbage’s design was the first to include a memory so that intermediate values did not have to be reentered.

His design also included the input of both numbers and mechanical steps making used of punched cards similar to those used in Jacquard’s loom.

During the later part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, computing advances were made rapidly. William Burroughs produced and sold a mechanical adding machine.

Dr. Herman Hollerith developed the first electro mechanical tabulator, which read information from a punched card.

His device revolutionized the census taken every ten years in the United States. Hollerith later formed a company today known as IBM.
Early History of Computing Hardware

Information and Responsibility

2010-04-08T08:19:00.000-07:00

Information and Responsibility
How do you feel at work if you were suddenly given access to a stack of sensitive corporate information you didn’t need for your job?

Probably as nervous as carrying a Tesco bag of banknotes up the High Street to the bank – unless you expect a directorship.

Otherwise you’d not want the responsibility, though you’d probably be flattened for being trusted with it.

In the command and control organization, everything is predictable and planned in advance.

Everyone has watertight job descriptions that don’t overlap with anyone else’s and the job descriptions determine the information each person needs.

The structure of the information systems mirrors the tree like reporting structure of the organization chart and access to information is only assigned on a ‘need to know’ basis.

This is because of people lower down were trusted to know as much as those higher up, the status and power of those in the upper levels would be undermined, threatening the whole structure.

Information means power and influence; at all levels, mangers only release it when it benefits them to do so.

Everyone knows what it feels like to work in that environment, because we all experienced it as children.

At home and school, parents and teachers had absolute power and knew everything, while we were powerless and supposed to know only what we were taught.

The world is changing fast but organization very similar to this stereotype still survive today.

Working for them is not all back: life is simple You are not responsible for anything outside your job description for a number of hours each month and in return you get paid a foxed salary.
Information and Responsibility

Model Financial Drivers

2010-03-19T22:56:00.000-07:00

Model Financial Drivers
In order for the users to the financial data warehouse to analyze historical performance of corporate operations, you need to make sure that these vital business rules are modeled into your data warehouse.

This is called business intelligence. Business intelligence is what added value from a printed report, to where the model itself can explain exceptions and variance in your data.

A financial data warehouse developed with a focus on human resources data will be able to answer questions about Monday sick leaves, tend in wages for certain departments and other questions related to providing financial analytics for employees in the human resource department.

However, this business intelligence is in most companies mainly located in the heads of salespeople, senior managers, accounting departments and other key people in your company.

The challenge is to transform all this valuable knowledge into rules sets in your data warehouse.

Users of the system are never a very homogenous group, request are coming to the financial department today from east and west for a wide variety of information.

There are a few reasons why this will change. On the contrary, you will probably see an explosion of requests to the system, and to what data it will contain when it goes live.

Thus it is important to conduct in depth research when modeling the system.
Model Financial Drivers

Define the Needs for Analysis and Reporting (Business Intelligence)

2010-03-01T18:14:00.000-08:00

Define the Needs for Analysis and Reporting (Business Intelligence)
The purpose of your data warehouse (DW) is to provide better and faster information to key personnel of the organization, helping them make better decisions, as well as providing management with better tool for understanding how the organization is performing.

The process in trying to describe your business can be summarized with the following processes:
Data source
Data input
Processes
Data output
Analysis
Vision

The most intuitive process would be to start at the top and proceed along to the bottom. This is known as traditional system design and a secure road that will bring to the target.

For business intelligence purposes, we need to turn the process upside down.

What type of analysis do they need to perform to execute this vision?

This determines what types of output will be needed. The outcome of the questions asked above will again provide answers for what type of data you need to feed to the system in order to support he vision.

By taking the controversial approach to designing your needs for data, it is given what data sources you need in order to complete the data warehouse.
Define the Needs for Analysis and Reporting (Business Intelligence)

Task Management Programs

2010-02-11T00:26:00.001-08:00

Task Management Programs
The task management programs of an operating system manage the accomplishment of the computing tasks of end users.

They give each tasks a slice of a CPU’s time and interrupt the CPU operations to substitute other tasks.

Task management may involve a multitasking capability where several computing tasks can occur at the same time.

Multitasking may take the form of multiprogramming, where the CPU can process the tasks of several programs at the same time, or timesharing, where the computing tasks if several users can be processed at the same time.

The efficiency of multitasking operations depends on the processing power of a CPU and the virtual memory and multitasking of the operating system it uses.

Most microcomputer, midrange, and mainframe operating systems provide a multitasking capability. With multitasking, end users can do two or more operations (e.g., keyboarding and printing) or application (e.g. word processing and financial analysis) concurrently, that is at the same time.

Multitasking on microcomputers has also been made possible by the development of more powerful microprocessors and their ability to directly address much larger memory capacities.

This allows an operating system to subdivide primary storage into several large partitions, each of which can be used by a different application program.

In effect, a single computer can act as if it were several computer, or virtual machines , since each application program is running independently at the same time.

The number of programs that can be run concurrently depends on the amount of memory that is available and the amount of processing each job demands.

That’s because a microprocessor (or CPU) can become overloaded with too many jobs and provide unacceptably slow response times.

However of memory and processing capacities are adequate, multitasking allows end users to easily switch from application to another, share data files among applications, and process some applications in a background mode.

Typically, background tasks include large printing jobs, extensive mathematical computation or unattended telecommunications session.
Task Management Programs

New Themes for New Organizations

2010-01-20T03:35:00.000-08:00

New Themes for New Organizations
Knowledge and service work in the information age requires new types of organization, with new structures, values methods and objectives.

From the written theories and from the practical examples of early adopters, we can derive some common themes;

*Market competition

*Non-hierarchical fluid organization structures

*Openness freedom of information self management

*Networks and excellent communications

*Teams, mutuality, alliances and cooperation

*Leaderships, coaching and coordination

*Shared visions and values metaphors and ambiguity

*Knowledge, learning, understanding

*People orientation, respect for the individual, ethics

*Commitment, involvement responsibility, trust

*Enthusiasm, fun, fulfillment, personal growth

*Truth, facts, methods, techniques

*Value and quality detrained by the customer

*Organizational, learning and continual improvement of product and service

*Broader, more complex, more worthy goals
New Themes for New Organizations

Resource management in Operating System

2009-12-30T19:31:00.000-08:00

Resource management in Operating System
An operating system uses a variety of resource management programs to manage the hardware and networking resources of a computer system including its CPU, memory, secondary storage devices, telecommunications processors and input/output peripherals.

For example, memory management programs keep track of where data and programs are stored. They may also subdivide memory into a number of sections and swap part of programs and data between memory and magnetic disks or other secondary storage devices.

This can provide a computer system with a virtual memory capability that is significantly larger than the real memory capacity of its primary storage circuits. So, a computer with a virtual memory capability can process large programs and greater amounts of data than the capacity of its memory chips would normally allow.
Resource management in Operating System

Computer Software

2009-11-07T03:13:00.001-08:00

Computer Software
A software program is actually a set of instructions written in various computer languages by programmers.

Software contains sequences of operations the computer will follow.

Before a program can run or be executed, the program must be loaded into main memory of the computer.

After that, programs can be executed to perform certain functions based on how they are design.
For example, the word processing program allows users to enter their typing and edit the content.

A graphic design program is used to perform graphic designs.

Most computer programs are written by people with special training, called computer programmers, who write the necessary instructions in programming languages.

Software is the brains of the computer. It tells the hardware what to do.

In fact, it’s software that determines computer’s personality.
Computer Software

The Information Age

2009-10-19T17:01:00.000-07:00

The Information Age
Managing a command and control organization depends on telling the workers what to do, then seeing that they do it.

It was easy to measure output and quality with a tangible product. Easy also to see if a manual worker was working hard or slacking.

But how do you supervise knowledge workers? If a designer or programmer is staring into space is he or she thinking about a work problem – or planning a holiday? How do you even measure the output or quality of the work as it is being done?

So, of you cannot control knowledge workers, can you command them?

Perhaps but only in broad terms, because the knowledge worker will b e closer to the action and therefore often knows better than the supervisor what needs doing.

Knowledge workers cannot perform well in the secrecy and mistrust of a traditional command and control environment.

They are best motivated by being given the problem and trusted with all the available information, then left to find a solution.

Instead of trying to command and control them, it is better to make sure you hire the right people, then inform and entrust them.

This is not an easy message to sell to chief executives, many of whom feel they are paid to call the shots, and there are still plenty of organizations with scope for better management of their knowledge workers.

However, there is also a growing band of new style organization that have abandoned the command and control model and the multilayer hierarchy.
The Information Age

The Operating System

2009-09-23T16:43:00.001-07:00

The Operating System
The operating system (OS) consists of the master of programs that manage the basic operations of the computer.

These programs provide the control and use of hardware resources, including disk space, memory, CPU time allocation, and peripheral devices.

They are also the interface between computer hardware and application programs, allowing end users can concentrate on their own tasks or application rather than on the complexities of managing the computer.

To be more specific, the operating system is used to control the hardware memory, schedule the execution of programs, and schedule input output traffic between the CPU and other devices.

A good operating system, can dramatically improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of program execution performance.

Many different operating systems are available for computers.

Some operating systems are designed for a microcomputer single user environment, and others are for multiple users.

The complexity of operating system is much higher in a multiple user operating system due to the management of computer memory and CPU time shared by many users.

Today, many computers use what is called an operating environment, which provides end users with a user friendly interface to use.

Some operating systems have a graphical user interface that provide visual clues such as icons and objects the help the users.

Each icon represents a folder, an application package, or file. By clicking icons, users can open a folder or use an application package.
The Operating System

Business Intelligence Functionality

2009-09-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

Business Intelligence Functionality
Business intelligence software is getting increasingly more powerful and although most of the popular solutions on the market share much common functionality, some might be easier to use or to offer more or fewer features than others.

The following list is some of the key features offered by many tools:
Drill-down (on dimension such as time, company trees, products, etc)
Graph, charting and trees
Exception highlighting
Pivot rows and columns
Drag and drop dimensions into current view or to the backyard
Custom calculations (calculate new measures based on existing ones)
Queries
Comments
Combo views
Dashboard
Business intelligence and web portals
Distribution of cubes/reports
Other popular analytical features (ranking, filtering, sorting etc.)

Business Intelligence Functionality

The User Interface

2009-08-08T08:17:00.000-07:00

The User Interface
The operating system performs five basic functions in the operations of computer system providing a user interface, resource management, task management, file management. And utilities and support services.

The user interfaces the part of the operating system that allows you to communicate with it so you can load program, access files and accomplish other tasks.

Three main types of user interfaces are the command-driven, menu-driven, and graphical user interface.

The trend in user interfaces for operating systems and other software is moving away from the entry of brief and user commands, or even the selection of choices from menus options.

Instead most software provides an easy-to- use graphical user interface (GUI) that uses icons, bars, button, boxes, and other images.

GUIs rely on pointing devices like the electronic mouse or touch-pad to make selections that help you get things done.
The User Interface

History of Information Retrieval

2009-07-13T18:09:00.000-07:00

History of Information Retrieval
Information retrieval is the process of searching within a document collection for a particular information need (called a query).

Although dominated by recent events following the invention of the computer, information retrieval actually has a long and glorious tradition.

The earliest document collections were recorded on the painted walls of caves. A cave dweller interested in searching a collection of cave paintings to answer a particular information query had to travel by foot, and stand, staring in front of each painting.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to collect and artifact without being gruesome.

Before the invention of paper, ancient Romans and Greeks recorded information on papyrus rolls.

Some papyrus artifacts from ancient Rome had tags attached to the rolls. These tags were an ancient form of today’s Post-it Note, and make an excellent addition to our museum.

A tag contained a short summary of the rolled document and was attached in order to save readers from unnecessarily unraveling a long irrelevant document.

These abstract also appeared in oral form. At the start of Greek plays in the fifth century B.C., the chorus recited an abstract of the ensuing action.

While no actual classifications scheme has survived from the artifacts of Greek and Roman libraries, we do know that another elementary information retrieval tool, the table of content, first appeared in Greek scrolls from the second century B.C.

As the stories goes, the Libraries of Pergamum threatened to overtake the celebrated Library of Alexandria as the best Library in the world, claiming the largest collection of papyrus rolls.

As the result, the Egyptians ceased the supply of papyrus to Pergamum, so the Pergamenians invented an alternative writing material parchment, which is made from thin layers of animal skin.

Unlike papyrus, parchment did not roll easily, so scribes folded several sheets of parchment and sewed them into books.

Other documents collections sprung up in a variety of fields. This dramatically accelerated with the re-invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg in 1450.

The wealthy proudly boasted of their private libraries and public libraries were instituted in America in the 1700s at the prompting of Benjamin Franklin.

More orderly ways of maintaining records of a collection’s holdings were devised.

These inventions were progress, yet still search was not completely in the hands of the information seeker. It took the inventions of the digital computer (1940s and 1950s) and the subsequent inventions of computerized search systems to move forward that goal.

The first computerized search systems used special syntax to automatically retrieve book and article information related to a user’s query.

Unfortunately, the cumbersome syntax kept search largely in the domain of libraries trained on the systems.

In1989 the storage, access and searching of document collections was revolutions by and invention named the World Wide Web by its founder Tim Berners-Lee.

Of course, our museum must include artifacts from this revolution such as a webpage, some HTML, and a hyperlink or two.

The World Wide Web became the ultimate signal of the dominance of the Information Age and the death of the Industrial Age.

Yet despite the revolution in information storage and access ushered in by the Web users initialing web searches found themselves floundering.

They were looking for the proverbial needle in an enormous, ever growing information haystack.

Al this change in 1998 when link analysis hit the information retrieval scene. The most successful search engines began using link analysis, technique that exploited the additional information inherent in the hyperlink structure of the Web, to improve the quality of search results.

Web search improved dramatically, and web searchers religiously used and promoted their favorite engines like Google and AltaVista.
History of Information Retrieval

World Class Performance

2009-06-29T22:20:00.000-07:00

World Class Performance
World class is a term coined by Dick Schonberger, consultant and author of Building a Chain of Customers, to describe organization which is consistently held in the highest regard by its customer, and can therefore compete successfully in world markets.

Tom Peters, another America, author of In Search of Excellence, Liberation Management and Beyond Hierarchy, describes these organizations as excellent.

They both agree that somehow, these organizations are consistently able to meet and often exceed their customers’ expectations.

This kind of exceptional performance cannot happen by chance; it must be made to happen by getting everyone in organization to work constantly toward that goal.

Why? Because customer expectations are constantly rising.

What we as consumers are delighted with today, we come to expect tomorrow and so any organizations that stands still on quality and customer service will soon fall behind.

Unfortunately, however, until recently most western organizations were saddled with a crippling handicap that had to be unburdened before they could hope to achieve excellence.

This handicap was an all-pervading heritage familiar to everyone at work.

It has always been there, we could not imagine life without it, and it was seldom questioned.

It was of course the ‘command and control’ system with these near the top of the tree making the decision for the rest lower down.

It’s incredible to think that towards the end of the twentieth century, most people at work in organizations of any size sill found themselves constrained by a structure first adopted thousands of years ago.

It was appropriate for the Roman army, and for businesses during the reign of Queen Victoria, because then, populations consisted, mostly of uneducated masses, with only a small, educated elite equipped to take charge of them.

But that changed half a century ago, with an educated majority in developed nations.

What a waste of potential: all those educated people in the lower half of the tree with ideas about their jobs and no opportunity to use them.
World Class Performance

New Breed of Business Intelligence Tools

2009-05-30T04:56:00.000-07:00

New Breed of Business Intelligence Tools
The solution to the problem of a poor analytical environment in a company with multiple data source, different report writers and lack of analytical tools can be implemented a data warehouse with modern business intelligence software as a front end for the users.

With modern ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) tools and most databases vendors now supporting open standards protocols it is finally becoming feasible for companies to implement data-warehouses that can be updated and maintained with relative case.

The result is a common data, repository, which provides decision makers with endless possibilities for investigating (data mining) and analyzing variances, trends and exceptions.

Because a modern business intelligence solution feeds off a frequently updated data-warehouse that includes detailed information it becomes much more than just a tool for executives (like the old executive information systems, but it can become a tool for any person within the organization or related to it who needs easy and fast access to summarized and detailed information from across the company’s databases.
New Breed of Business Intelligence Tools

Operating Systems

2009-05-01T18:11:00.000-07:00

Operating Systems
The most important system software package for any computer is its operating system.

An operating system is an integrated system of programs that manages the operations of the CPU, controls the input/output and storage resources and activities of the computer systems, and provide various support services as the computer executes the application program of users.

The primary purpose of an operating system is to maximize the productivity of a computer system by operating it in the most efficient manner.

An operating system minimizes the amount of human intervention required during processing.

It helps application programs perform common operations such as accessing a network, entering data, savings and retrieving files, and printing or displaying output.

If anybody hands on experience on computer will know that operating system, must be loaded and activated before you can accomplish other tasks.

This emphasizes the fact that the operating system is the most indispensible components of the software interface between users and the hardware of their computer system.
Operating Systems

E-Learning

2009-04-04T15:13:00.001-07:00

E-Learning
In order for web-based e-learning to provide a satisfactory learning environment, it is necessary to make available to user’s computer with sound capability (including headset or loudspeaker) and an internet connection with reasonable speed.

E-learning is also a great tool for repetitive training. Even of users were trained at some point in time. Chances are that they did not frequently use all the features of the software and they will forget certain parts of it.

With all the course modules residing on a web site, the users can log on and retake specific course modules at any time.

Most e-learning providers will offer courses on a per- time basis or on a subscription basis.

If you have a customized or home grown in Business Intelligence solution and no e-learning provider yet offers courses for your software, you can create your own online course and put them on your website, intranet or local area network.

This option can also be if great value if you need to train large number of users in a few modules and you need to show them specific features and functionability.

Depending on the resource available in your organization and their skill level, course development can be handled by your own team, or outsourced to the e-learning software vendor or a consultant.

Depending on the quality required and the amount of custom animations, graphics, and the like that are used, one hour online courses can cost form a few thousand to $50,000 to develop.

The key is to evaluate the cost/benefit and then pick the best alternative.

There is also some very inexpensive and easy-to-use software you or a power user can utilize to create the course yourself.

It all depends on how many people will use the sources and how long they can be used before they are out of date, as well as the time and resources you have available.

Software training (like Business Intelligence) lends itself very well to online courses because you will see that actual screens you will be using in real life, with information, buttons, and menus residing on a screen, and what can be better than showing the real screens and a mouse clicking on items while an instructor’s voice is explaining in the background?
E-Learning

System Software: Computer System Management

2009-02-24T06:54:00.000-08:00

System Software: Computer System Management
System software consists of programmes that manage and support a computer system and its information processing activities.

For example, operating systems and network management programs serve as a vital software interface between computer networks and hardware and the application programs of end users.

System management programs
Programs that manage the hardware, software, network, and data resources of the computer systems during its execution of the various information processing jobs of users.

Example of important systems management programs are operating systems, network management programs, database management systems and system utilities.

System development programs
Programs that help users develop information system programs and procedures and prepare user programs for computer processing. Major development programs are programming language translators and editors, other programming tools, and computer aided software package.
System Software: Computer System Management

Overload of Information

2009-01-31T03:53:00.000-08:00

Overload of Information
There is more information of every type available now than ever before. How often you ‘personally selected’ at home, and at work, for the chance of receiving a fabulous holiday – and some information?

Most of it is junk information – junk mail, e-mail and junk faxes that you file straight away in the waste paper bin – guess who personally selected you?

A computer, of course. They are great for sending out information: more computers are used for word processing than for any other task. Computers are amazingly fast at processing some types of data, in particular financial and numerical data once it has been converted into electronic digital signals.

There are even programs for filtering out, or redirecting, certain classes of e-mail, but computers cannot yet open the morning postbag, sift out the junk and bin it.

So history is repeating itself: the invention of the typewriter with its high output of thirty or forty words per minute did not lead us to employ fewer scribes to write letters and other documents.

Instead we employed more people to produce much more written work and now the word processor is having the same effect. The net result is more people with keyboards skill than ever before, and far more information on every conceivable subject, competing for our attention and often failing to get it.

It seems the computer that help us manage information by processing data after, far from solving our problems, actually create new problems by adding to the volume, variety and complexity of information available.

Nevertheless some organizations thrive in this new environment: they use computers and modern information systems to make better decisions more quickly, allowing them to respond faster to customer requirements, which is markets today brings significant competitive advantage.
Overload of Information

Business Intelligence: Impact on the Internet

2009-01-13T05:43:00.000-08:00

Business Intelligence: Impact on the Internet
Business intelligence will empower users by giving them access to easily analyze and visualize essential financial and statistical data from the company’s different transactional databases.

The internet is making business intelligence applications even more powerful for several reasons:

Data sources such as exchange rates, competitive or industry measures, and so on can be accessed online and use by the business intelligence applications.

Convenience – the business intelligence application itself can be web-based, allowing users to access the system from home, while traveling or from remote offices.

Speed data of distribution or information is available immediately from anywhere.

Speed data collection – budgets, statistics, comments and the like can be entered from anywhere.

There is no need for software installation and maintenance on users’ computers.

Most business intelligence vendors now have a web version of their software, and as long as you have the infrastructure in place, you should seriously evaluate making your business intelligence information available through a web based application.
Business Intelligence: Impact on the Internet

What is a Groupware?

2008-12-25T18:27:00.000-08:00

What is a Groupware?
Groupware is collaboration software, that is software that helps workgroups and teams work together to accomplish group assignments.

Groupware is a fast-growing category of general purpose application software that combines a variety of software features and functions to facilitate collaboration. For example, groupware products like Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchanges, and Netscape Communicator support collaboration through electronic mail, discussion groups and databases, scheduling, task management, data, audio and video conferencing.

Groupware products are changing in several ways to meet the demand for better tools for collaboration. Groupware in now designed to use internet and corporate internet and extranets to make collaboration possible in a global scale by virtual teams located anywhere in the world.

For example, team members might use the Internet for global E-mail, project discussion forums, and joint Web page development. Or they might use corporate intranets to publish project news and progress reports, and work jointly on documents stored on Web servers.

Collaborative capabilities are also being added to other software to give them groupware features. For examples, in the Microsoft Office software suite, Microsoft World keep track of who made revisions to each document, Excel tracks all changes made to a spreadsheet, and Outlooks lets you keep track of tasks you delegate to other team members.
What is a Groupware?

E-Government

2008-12-15T08:00:00.000-08:00

E-Government
In the commercial sphere, business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C) and business to employee (BTE) electronic business has come widely accepted.

Government are also embracing the internet to provide services to business (G2B) and citizens (C2C), as well as government to government (G2G), citizen to citizen (C2C), government to supplier (G2S) and government to employee (G2E).

In year 2000 European Union Summit in Lisbon set ambitious goal of making Europe the world most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy. It resulted in the eEurope Action plan to exploit the full potential of the Internet to promote a competitive economy. The objective is to make it easier to deal with local, regional and national governments by making services available electronically.

The benefits of e Government are reduced costs through more efficient processes, the integration of disparate agencies systems, and improved service to citizens via the internet and other electronic channels. Investment by government will also decrease the cost of doing business through simplification of procedures self-service systems and one stop shop for enterprises. The biggest beneficiaries here will be the small to medium enterprises, which are the backbone of the European economy.
E-Government