UMC Mobile App: Streamlining Milk Product Ordering, Payments, And Essay.

1. What is the role of business process modelling for organisations such as UMC? What are the benefits of providing an As-Is model and a To-Be model to the General Manager. Include your Swim Lane Diagram (from Task B) as part of your explanation

2. Broadly explain the importance of information in organisations like UMC and provide an example of how Information Technology can be a useful tool for attracting new customers and gathering information. Provide some recommendations on how UMC could be modernised. Consider network improvements and cloud services as a part of your recommendations.

3. To promote the use of the new ordering system. UMC will need to develop a mobile compliant version of the new ordering system as either a native stand-alone app or as a mobile webpage app. Provide the general manager with a valid argument for the preferred method.

4. Discuss the differences between Web analytics, Social Network Analysis and Customer Relationship Management, including outlining the environment from which the information is collect from, the type of information it collects and the benefit from the information collected.

5. As UMC will be collecting information (personal and financial) from its clients, outline the privacy laws and cybersecurity measures that the company will need to consider to assure the customer that their information is safe and secure

Purpose of the UMC Mobile App

The purpose of the proposed UMC mobile app is to provide a platform through which UMC can promote their milk products thus allowing customers to view all the available products and make orders and payments through the application. This will ultimately make the process of ordering and payments of orders easy for both the customers and UMC. UMC will be able to promote their products easily using the mobile application since it has the potential to reach many users who are its customers because mobile phones are very common and are being used by people as a part of their daily lives.

The application will create a direct link between the customers and UMC. Customers will be able to know which products are available and the cost of each product. The manual and tedious process of making an order through telephone will be replaced with a more efficient process.

The three main design principles considered for the design of the UMC APP are;

• Focus on the end user- The design of the application mainly focuses on the end user. All design decisions made during the design process of the application are made with the end user in mind. The main question asked during at every point of the design process is how the design aspect will benefit the end user or the customer. By focusing on the customer, the final design achieves high usability for all customers (Yvonee, 2017).
• Mobile first principle- Mobile devices have a lot of features that differentiate them from desktop computers for example voice, location, notifications, accelerometer among others. When the designing the mobile application, the design is designed around mobile devices ensuring that the end users get maximum benefit from all features offered by mobile devices.
• Scalability- Mobile devices are very scalable in terms of screen sizes and resolutions that is why it’s very important to consider the scalability across different devices. The design should not only consider small screen mobile devices but should also consider tablets which have a bigger screen.

Usability is not only about the mobile being scalable across different devices. Other usability guidelines considered during the design of the UMC app are;

• Common usage patterns- There are common patterns which are used by almost all users. For example the F-pattern is greatly considered because almost all users thus the application was designed with this in mind.
• Understanding the context of use- Unlike desktop computers where by the user has to sit maybe on a desk to use an application mobile devices are most of the times used on the go thus the user is not sitting down giving 100% of his or her concentration on the mobile device. The design of the app should consider this by making it easy to use the application. This can be achieved by limiting the number of features in a single screen to avoid cluttering effect. The application should be split into different activities where each activity consists of a single primary action. For example the login page should not be in the registration page.

Design of touch- Designing for touch requires the design of the application to consider that different users have different sizes of thumbs unlike maybe a desktop device where a mouse is used to click. Thus designing touch is an important usability aspect for the UMC application. This aspect considers designing larger buttons which are easy to touch to perform an action.

Business process modelling is critical for organizations as it is helping the management to improve and understand their business processes (Modernanalyst.com, 2011). Some of the benefits of using business process modelling are;

• It helps to align the operations of the business with its strategies. This is especially useful when there is a change in the operations like adoption of a new application for UMC because it will require changes in the operations and how different operations are undertaken
• It helps improve communication between processes- This is achieved by helping the different teams making up the business understand their roles, what they are supposed to do and exactly how to do it.
• It increases consistency and control- Business process modelling helps businesses to design their business processes and rules and ensure that they are applied consistently at all times.

Business process modeling involves using an as-Is model and transforming it to a To-Be model. Presenting the two models to the manager will help the manager to understand the changes that are happening for the business operations and processes. For UMC, the manager will be able to understand how the current business processes works and how it will differ from the new one when new operations and processes are adapted.

Information is very important to organizations. There are many ways of getting information but perhaps the easiest way of getting insightful information for a company like UMC is through implementation of a good database system through which the proposed application will run on. The data stored in the database can be very useful to the organization in the short term and long term. For the short term, the business can use the information to understand the market better by analyzing order information and customer information. For the long term, large amounts of data can be used for business intelligence where by the data is analyzed to gain insights which will help the management in decision making.  To ensure the data is stored in a safe and secure location UMC can adapt cloud services thus the organization can take advantage of highly scalable platforms without having to invest a lot of money to setup on premises server rooms.

Design Principles Considered for the UMC App

For the proposed for mobile application, the preferred method of developing the application is mobile webpage application. This is the best method for the application compared to native stand-alone because its easier and cheaper to develop with for all mobile platforms. Mobile webpage application is involves developing a mobile application to run on a browser thus every mobile device with a browser can run the application. Thus developing the application can be done one platform thus testing and maintenance is easy (viswanathan, 2018). Although the native standalone apps are better and efficient compared to mobile webpage apps they require much more resources because to take advantage of all platforms then you have to develop a mobile application for every single platform and the development process can be different for every platform.

Web analytics aims at understanding the behavior of users across various web pages (Optipedia, n.d.). Web analytics is very important for businesses as it helps them to benchmark and measure the website’s performance thus helping the business to identify performance indicators that are key to the business including conversion rate and purchase patterns. Web analytics is really important for a business as it gives insights to the business on how the business can create a better user experience for its visitors. Understanding user behavior patterns helps the business to optimize key conversion metrics.

Social media analytics gathers information from social media websites. The information gathered can then be used to help the business to understand sentiments and attitudes of the customer thus enabling the business to build rich profiles for its customers and build and improve effective business strategies (Sharma, 2015). The type of information gotten from social media include;

• Listening- Information about what is being said about the company.
• Analysis and monitoring- This involves looking for trends in consumer behavior for example real-time consumer choices, sentiments and intentions.
• Understanding consumers- Social media analytics provides the business with insights into their consumers including gender, age, interests, relationship status, socio-economics and education background.

This involves analyzing the interactions of a customer with the business though a defined customer lifecycle (Rouse, 2018). The main goal of analyzing the customer relationship is to improve the service relationships and assist in retaining the customer and driving growth of sales. Customer relationship management will be made easy by implementing the application through which customers can register thus the business will have customer information and their orders based on the orders they have made from the application. 

To ensure the customer data is safe UMC must ensure the following security measures are followed to help protect customer data;

• Use of strong passwords- By using strong passwords, customer privacy is ensured by making it difficult for someone to guess a password (nibusinessinfo.co.uk, n.d.). This is ensured by creating a password policy which should be followed by all times.
• Controlling access – This is done by making sure that users are only able to access what they are authorized to. Controlling access should be done for physical access to premises and computer networks
• Using a firewall- A firewall should be used as a gatekeeper between the servers and the internet. Firewalls can help prevent attacks from viruses and malwares.
• Intrusion monitoring- Intrusion monitoring involves using monitoring systems that detect any sort of intrusion then raise an alarm. The organization can then take action depending on the alarm thus preventing a possible attack. 

References

https://www.modernanalyst.com/Resources/Articles/tabid/115/ID/1728/5-Key-Benefits-of-Business-Process-Modeling.aspx

nibusinessinfo.co.uk. (n.d.). Common cyber security measures. [online] Available at: https://www.nibusinessinfo.co.uk/content/common-cyber-security-measures [Accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

Optipedia (n.d.). Optimizely: The World's Leading Experimentation Platform. [online] Optimizely.com. Available at: https://www.optimizely.com/optimization-glossary/web-analytics/ [Accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

Rouse, M. (2018). What is CRM (customer relationship management) ? - Definition from WhatIs.com. [online] SearchCRM. Available at: https://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/CRM [Accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

Sharma, A. (2015). The Difference Between Social and Web Analytics| Loginradius. [online] LoginRadius. Available at: https://blog.loginradius.com/2014/09/difference-social-web-analytics/ [Accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

viswanathan, P. (2018). Should You Develop a Native App or a Web App?. [online] Lifewire. Available at: https://www.lifewire.com/native-apps-vs-web-apps-2373133 [Accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

Yvonee (2017). Designing for Mobile Apps: Overall Principles, Common Patterns, and Interface Guidelines. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/blueprint-by-intuit/native-mobile-app-design-overall-principles-and-common-patterns-26edee8ced10 [Accessed 12 Oct. 2018].