Foundations Of Business Computing Essay.

Discuss about the Electronic Commerce Research and Applications.

IS or Information systems is the organized or structured system to collect, store, organized and communicate any type of data or information (Eason 2014). Any specific operation of data is done with the help of this information system. It can also be defined as the collection of various components that could be utilized for interacting and producing significant information. The internal information is mainly focuses with this system and the external information is discarded. All types of organizations utilize the information system for the purpose of storing their confidential and sensitive information within the database. Information technology is the proper utilization of systems for several data operations within the context of any organization or business (Schwalbe 2015). This information technology is the significant subset of the ICT or information and communications technology. Easy decision making is possible with this type of technology. The computer servers are responsible for running the various business applications.

The following report outlines a brief discussion on the topic of foundations of business computing. Eight vital questions are being answered in the report. They are the IT megatrends, Porter’s five forces, two important case studies, social commerce, organizational issues, enterprise system and database management system. Relevant details are provided within the report.

The information technology megatrends or simply IT megatrends refer to those various technologies that are responsible for changing or shaping the digital future and hence bringing huge alterations in the technological world (Bilbao-Osorio, Dutta and Lanvin 2013). These five IT megatrends are thus considered as the most effective and efficient technologies for the future generation. The five megatrends of information technology for shaping digital future are as follows:

1. i) Next Generation Mobiles: The first and the foremost megatrend of information technology are the next generation mobile phones (Holtshouse 2013). This refers to all types of smart devices or tablets. These are the electronic devices that are when connected or linked to various other devices through separate wireless protocols like near field communications, wireless fidelity, Bluetooth and many others. These smart devices have the ability in operating interactively. The most significant examples of this smart device mainly include smart phones, tablets, smart key chains, smart watches and many more.
2. ii) Social Media 2.0: The second important megatrend of IT is social media 2.0. This is the second version of social media that is utilized for the purpose of communication. Each and every organization utilizes this social media version 2 in their business so that they can maximum competitive advantages. Moreover, it allows staying in touch with the customers and collaborating with them. The entire transformation of a business depends on the social media interaction of that organization. Thus, the digital future is shaped.

Cloud Computing: This is the easiest method of transferring any type of data. Highly secured in nature, this particular technology of cloud computing is considered as one of the most significant megatrend of information technology. It is the paradigm of information technology, which enables major access to the shared pools of system resources. The infrastructure costs of IT are solely reduced with this specific technology. With high security, it is useful is shaping the digital future.

1. iv) Internet of Things: IoT or Internet of Things is the fourth megatrend of IT. It is the network of all physical devices, home appliances and vehicles, which are eventually embedded with the software, sensors and actuators for the sole purpose of connecting as well as exchanging data or information. All such things are identified with the help of embedded computing systems. The digital linking of any inanimate object helps in shaping the digital future.
2. v) Big Data: The final megatrend in IT is big data. It is the specific data sets, which are extremely large and voluminous. Large sets of data could be easily dealt with these and hence the complexity of data handling becomes extremely easier. Thus, it is termed as another important step towards shaping of the digital future.

Porter’s Five Forces Framework can be defined as the basic tool or the analysis of the competition of any specific business (E. Dobbs 2014). The competitive advantages of any business are evaluated with this particular management tool. The five forces of Porter are as follows:

1. i) Threat of New Entrants: This is the first force of Porter’s analysis, which defines about the new entrants within a market. The profitable companies, which eventually yield the higher returns, substantially attract all the new firms or companies. The new entrants of the market subsequently decrease the profitability of the other companies within the market (Dälken 2014). There are various factors that have the effect of the treat of new entrants within the market. The most significant factors include existence of various barriers, absolute cost, and disadvantages of cost, capital requirements, and brand equity, switching costs, network effect, product differentiation and many others.
2. ii) Threat of Substitutes: The substitute product utilizes any separate technology for trying to solve the similar requirement. When a company enters into the market, there is always a threat that the substitute products would take up the market and hence the company should be careful about their products and services (Stair and Reynolds 2013). There are several important potential factors for this particular force. They mainly include buyer’s switching cost, easy substitution, availability of the closer substitutes and many more.

Porter's Five Forces

Bargaining Power of Customers: The bargaining power of the customers refers to the market of various outputs. It is the core ability of the customers for putting them into pressure and thus affecting the sensitivity of the customers for changing the prices. The organizations have the ability in reducing the buyer’s power like implementation of any loyalty program (Galliers and Leidner 2014). The buyer’s power is high only when the buyers have various options and low only they have lesser options. The potential factors of this particular threat mainly involve switching costs of buyers and dependency degree on distribution channels.

1. iv) Bargaining Power of Suppliers: The fourth threat is the bargaining power of suppliers. It is referred to as the market of inputs. The supply of all the raw materials, services, components and labour are the source of power where there are various substitutes (Holtshouse 2013). The potential factors of this threat mainly include supplier switching costs, supplier competition, substitute inputs and many more.
2. v) Industry Rivalry: The industry rivalry refers to the rivalry of the various industries within an existing market. The competitive rivalry is the most significant determinant in any market (E. Dobbs 2014). The various potential factors are sustainable competitive advantages, degree of transparency, competitive strategies and many more.

For the decisions of information system investments the most significant force amongst the five forces of Porter’s framework is the bargaining power of customers. This is mainly because of the fact that the customer’s sensitivity to the change or alteration of prices. The buyer’s power is reduced and hence the availability of the buyer’s information is enhanced in this type.

For the decisions of information system investments the least significant force amongst the rest is the threat of substitutes (Dälken 2014). The substitute products are the most important factors in any business and since they do not directly affect the business competitiveness, they are termed as the least significant force.

In the next 5 years, the number of 50% provided in the case study would be changed to 65% and in the next 10 years, the number of 50% provided will be changed to more than 80%. The world will be changed to a complete Internet dependent world.

            The changes that are to be made to the infrastructure of global networking are mainly with cloud and wireless networking.

            The main issue is that the world will be becoming Internet dependent by this and the opportunity is that knowledge gaining would be easier.

Social commerce is the distinct subset of electronic commerce, involving online media and social media and also the contributions of the user for the purpose of assisting them to buy as well as sell products or services online (Huang and Benyoucef 2013). Social interaction is done with this type of e commerce sites. The organizations advertise their products on the social commerce with the help of various social networks with the transactions of e commerce.

The customers are most important stakeholders of any organization. The companies do anything to leverage to grasp their customers. Social commerce is the basic way of leveraging the social network of consumers for the purpose of advertising the products and services (Zhou, Zhang and Zimmermann 2013). The ten steps for this process are as follows:

Social Commerce

All these steps are required for leveraging the social media accounts of the customers and thus influencing the factors of the competitiveness of any business.

There are various important and significant organizational issues that are associated with the utilization of the applications of social media (Grajales et al. 2014).

            From the perspective of the organization hierarchies, the major organizational issues with the application of social media are as follows:

1. i) The first issue is that the employees or the staffs eventually represent the brand image (Gouhar 2017). There is always a risk that the employees would be posting something vulnerable about the top management on the social media that would damage the reputation of the company.
2. ii) The second issue is that the organizational hierarchy will be present on the social media and thus the confidentiality is lost.

            From the perspective of the technological inertia, the major organizational issues with the application of social media are as follows:

1. i) The first issue is the server breakdown (Stonebraker et al. 2013). If the social media webpage of the organization would crash, the customers will not be able to reach down to them and thus it is an important issue for the organization.
2. ii) Anything that is posted on the social media gets the instant attention of the customers. Therefore, any mistake made on the social media is extremely hard to rectify. This is the second issue (Alam and Shakil 2013).

            From the perspective of the security concerns, the major organizational issues with the application of social media are as follows:

1. i) The first issue is the information breaching. The confidential information should not be lost at any account.
2. ii) The second organizational issue with the social media application is the loss of financial data (Laudon and Laudon 2016). Any financial datum should not be shared on the social media platform.

DBMS or database management system can be defined as the systems software that is used to create as well as manage the databases. This database management system is responsible for providing the programmers and the users the most effective and systematic method for creating, retrieving, updating and managing data (Alam and Shakil 2013). This DBMS serves as the basic interface within the end users and database to ensure that the data is properly organized and thus remaining easily accessible by all. The most important things that are managed by DBMS are data, database schema and database engine.

Entity can be defined as any real world object, which could be easily recognized. For an example, within a school database, the courses offered, students, teachers and classes are referred to as the entities. The entity set is the collection of same entity types.

The attributes are the entity properties. It is the database component like a table. These help to describe the various instances within the database row (Gouhar 2017). For an example, there is an entity called STUDENT. The attributes of this entity are Student ID, name, address and contact number.

Records are the mainly composed of various fields, each of those fields comprises of one particular item of information. A record set eventually constitute any file (Sustainment 2014). For an example, a personnel file comprises of records, having three fields that are an address field, a name field and a field of phone number. In RDBMS, these records are known as tuples.

Enterprise systems or ES are the packages of large scale application software, which eventually support the business processes, data analytics, reporting and flows of information within complex organizations (Leon 2014). The rise of this type of systems has occurred mainly for the communication with the other systems within any specific organization. The performance of the business processes is increased with the help of this enterprise system.

Organizational Issues

The most significant types of enterprise systems that are rising in today’s world mainly include enterprise resource planning system or ERP, enterprise planning system and customer relationship management or CRM software (Tarhini, Ammar and Tarhini 2015). The systems of the business intelligence and data warehousing are mainly evaluated with the rise of enterprise systems. This type of enterprise system is mainly built on various platforms of software, like Fusion of Oracle and NetWeaver of SAP.

1. a) It is the responsibility of the company for ensuring that the algorithms are not discriminatory. This is because they are responsible for maintaining the computer systems and the customer relationship management system is maintained by them. If they will not preserve the computer systems, major problems would occur.
2. b) Yes, these types of platforms should be completely bias-free and every user should be allowed to access such platforms. Thus, the platforms like Google and Facebook would be more widely accepted by all.

Conclusion

Therefore, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that, information system or IS is the collection of various networks of software, hardware or any equipments, which the organization or people utilize for collecting filtering, processing, distributing and collecting of data or information. The information can even be disseminated with the help of this information system. The entire procedure of decision making becomes explicitly easier with the information system. Moreover, control and analysis are done within the organization. The various components of an information system mainly include hardware, software, data, networking communication and many more. The most significant role of this information system is to change any data to information with proper process. Moreover, the organizational knowledge is enhanced with this information system. Information technology is the most easiest mode of storing confidential or sensitive data within the organizational database. All the business operations are easily executed with this type of technology and the commercial utilization of this type of technology is encompassed with both telephony as well as computer technology. Every business application includes database such as SQL Server, email server such as Exchange, Customer Relationship Management system and Enterprise Resource Planning systems. All these applications manipulate or disperse the data for the business operations. The above report has properly outlined the detailed description on the information system and information technology with significant details. Various questions are answered in this above mentioned report.

References

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