Business Use of the Internet

Business use of the internet has expanded from an electronic information exchange to a broad platform for strategic business applications.

Notice how applications like collaboration among business partners, providing customer and vendor support, and electronic commerce have become major business uses of the internet.

Other studies of leading corporations and organizations show that they are also using Internet technologies for marketing, sales, and customer relationship management applications.

However, these studies also show that the strong growth of cross functional business applications and the emergence of applications in engineering, manufacturing, human resource, and accounting. Companies are using the Internet for business in a variety of ways, including enterprise communications and collaborations, electronic commerce, and strategic business alliance.

At General Electric Co. for example customers and designers can use intranets, extranets, the internet, and project collaborations technology to help construct a power plant from the ground up to the web.

General Electric and customer engineers can now hold virtual meeting in which blueprints can be exchanged and manipulated in real time. Then customers can use the web to watch from anywhere in the world as a turbine is built and moves down the production lines, ordering at last minute changes as needed.

While General Electric’s new system should give the company a 20% and 30% reduction in the time it takes to built a turbine and could improve the annual output of each turbine by 1% to 2%. This is one of competitive advantage.
Business Use of the Internet

What is metadata?

The main distinction is that metadata is exclusive to electronic information. In computer terminology, the prefix ‘meta’ is commonly used to mean ‘about’, so a metalanguage is a language used to describe other languages, and metadata is data to describe other data.

It can be created for nay data or information resource and is routinely used to describe or provide functional information for all types of digital data.

Metadata is of paramount importance for persons, organizations and endeavors of every dimension that are increasingly turning to the World Wide Web.

It facilitates discovery of relevant information, helps in organizing electronic resources, facilitates interoperability and legacy, resource integration, provide digital identification and support archiving and preservation.

Metadata is used in traditional database management system such as relational database systems to store information on the size, structure, location, modification dates and number of tables in the database system.
What is metadata?

Cyber attack of pharming

Pharming attacks redirected traffic way from a legitimate website towards a false site, for example one that has been set up to look like a legitimate bank’s homepage. The term ‘pharming’ has existed since 1996, but it was not until late 2003, that the technique actually emerged in the service do cyber criminals.

Pharming attacks are similar to phishing attacks in that they are designed to extract confidential data from victims by pretending to be a trusted source and requesting information.

The difference is that pharming attacks resolve the victim’s DNS to a malicious server when attempting to visit a legitimate website. Pharming can be conducted either by altering the hosts file on a victim’s computer or by exploitation of a vulnerability in DNS server software. Redirects of this nature are often facilitated by malware already downloaded and installed on the victim’s machine and represent a one-to-many attack directed at the widest possible network of victims.

It is a form of online fraud very similar to phishing as pharmers rely upon the same bogus websites and theft of confidential data.
Cyber attack of pharming

Direct Attack of computer

When a computer is the object of an attack, it is the entity being attacked. There are two types of attacks: direct attacks and indirect attacks.

A direct attack is when a hacker uses his personal computer to break into a system. A direct attack would take the form of hacking into computer system and rewriting or stealing information. Some recent examples have that hackers operate for political purposes.

Direct attacks originate from the threat itself. Indirect attacks originate from a system or resource that itself has been attacked and is malfunctioning or working under the control of a threat.

A computer can, therefore, be both the subject and object of an attack when, for example, it is first the object of an attack and then compromised and used to attack another systems, at which point it becomes the subject of an attack.

The target of an attack is always the protected information. An object of direct attack is the object whose analysis or usage will allow successful unauthorized access to protected information.
Direct Attack of computer

What is phishing?

Phishing has been one of the fastest-growing types of online crime in recent years. Spam has evolved to a new and dangerous form known as ‘phishing’.

Phishing differs from spam in that it is generated by a criminal intent on stealing personal data for financial gain. Phishing is a form of social engineering that consists of deceiving potential victims into revealing their personal or their company’s confidential information such as social security and financial account numbers, account passwords and other identity or security information.

The term 'social engineering' broadly refers to the act of manipulating people into unwittingly behaving in certain ways. Modern phishers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Some phishing messages can be personalized, using the target’s actual name.

URLs can be disguised so that discrepancies do not appear. When in doubt the safest thing to do is always to access the institution by typing (not copying), it’s name directly in the web browser rather than clicking on a link in e-mail.

Phishing remains a significant problem despite affecting a relatively small fraction of total internet users. The growing number of internet users coupled with the ease and low cost of carrying out phishing attacks have exposed virtually every e-mail user to phishing attacks.
What is phishing?

Managing Information: Accessible Filing

The reason why computers are sure to take over in more and more areas of organizational life is that they can make any information already collected for one purpose instantly available, to be used for many other secondary purposes. This has opened up totally new ways of using information.

Let us take for example the way information about groceries bought by consumers can be used in a retail outlet. In corner shops the proprietor often operates the till and once the customer has paid for his or her purchases the only record of the transaction is on the till roll – to all intents and purposes inaccessible.

It is of little consequence though because the proprietor is close enough to the action for decision making and knows roughly what the day’s taking are, how many customer have been served and whether there has been a run on a particular item.

In the supermarket, however, there may be 30 checkout operators and 10 000 or more different lines stocked. At peak times, purchases may be leaving the supermarket at a rate of 40 000 items per hour. Stocks of each line must be reordered to arrive at the rate of consumption or changing demand for particular lines caused by promotional; activities or food scarce could be easily lead to empty shelves to throw away ‘till roll’ data collected for the primary purpose of calculating how much to charge the customer.

Once collected it must be used again for stock control, a secondary use. And that’s not the end of the story. Information is expensive to collect, but once held in digital form it costs next to nothing to store and so can be freely used over and over gain for a variety of secondary purpose.

For instance, till roll data collected over a period of months or years can be analyzed for long term trends and presented graphically to aid in forecasting and strategic planning.

Till roll data becomes valuables for direct marketing when linked to particular customers who presented a loyalty card. Customer who buys cat food may be interested in special offers in cat litter, and those who buy diapers may try a new range of baby foods. Their addresses are known, so they can be targeted for mail shots customized to their life styles and preferences.
Managing Information: Accessible Filing

Executive Information Systems

Executive Information Systems are designed to generate information that is abstract enough to present the whole company operation in a simplified version to satisfy senior management.

The advent of Executive Information Systems in the late 70s and early 80s promised to provide support for executives, with little computing skills required of users.

Factors which have led to the evolution of Executive Information Systems, include: *The need to reduce the large corps of middles managers
*Progress in computer technology to the point where computerized information systems than can support the decision making requirements of upper level managers are now possible
*The increased computer literacy of corporate executives today
*The increased complexity of decision making in today’s global economy

Most Executive Information Systems have highly interactive graphical user interfaces GUIs. The typical Executive Information Systems presents output using text, graphics and color; has multiple presentation formats and can be tailored and customized for each executive.

Using Executive Information Systems, CEO, senior and executive vice president and board of directors can track the performance of their company and its various units to assess the business environment and to develop strategic directions for the company’s future.

The system is normally connected with online information services, so that top executive could access data whenever they require for the same.

The use of Executive Information Systems by executive provides several benefits for them.
*Increases the quality of decision-making
*Provides a competitive advantage
*More comprehensive analysis
*Greater confidence
*Improved service by speeding up of the flow of information
Executive Information Systems

Web cookies can improve data accuracy

A cookie is a piece of information that is stored by web browser in the user’s; computer, where it waits to be sent back to the server the next time the browser accesses that particular web address.

A cookie is just a simple text file that usually contains a website address and a unique ID.

By returning a cookie to a web server, the browser provides the server a means of associating the current page view with prior page views in order to ‘remember’ something about the previous page request and events.

An e-commerce site might use a cookie to store information about the purchases a user has made in the past.

When the user returns to the site, the site’s software can retrieve the cookie-based data and use the data to create a custom page that contains products similar to those the user has purchased in the past.

Cookie comes in two minor variations: session cookies and persistent cookies.

Session cookies last only as long as the visitor in the site and are deleted after the user closes her web browser or after some period of inactivity.

Persistent cookies last beyond a single visit and have an expiration date sometime in the future.

Cookies are extremely limited in size. Generally, only about 4kb of data can be set in a cookie, meaning they are unacceptable for large values such as documents or mail.

Cookies provide a great service to web measurement application, allowing unique visitors to be tracked from visit to visit and enabling valuable measurements like frequency of visit and lifetime value.
Web cookies can improve data accuracy 

What is the World Wide Web definition?

The World Wide Web is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the internet. The World Wide Web also known as the Web was introduced in 1992 at the Center for European Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland.

Prior to the World Wide Web, the internet was only a massive interconnected network of computers, which was text oriented and used primarily by large corporations and research institutes for sharing information. 

The internet and the World Wide Web together tear down the traditional walls of the classroom and connect it electronically to the rest of the world.

Unlike trips to the library that were inconvenient and time consuming, research via the World Wide Web is conducted online at the office, school or home.

The World Wide Web is organized as asset of hypertext documents interconnected by hyperlinks, used in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to construct links between documents.

A web page or webpage is a document or resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device.
What is the World Wide Web definition?

Content provider

Content provider creates and provides content that it makes available online through its own website or through an intermediary, such as content platform to customers.

They are the companies that operate an internet-based service. Their core competence is the creation and managing of content and the relationships with those who use, enhance, or support the content. Content is much more than just the written word.

Content is much more than just the written word. It’s the many elements that combine to make a site, including text, images, audio, video and community.

As the number of e-commerce web sites increases, so does the demand for content. A web site operator pays various content provider for news stories, information and other online content in order to attract users to the site.

Alternatively, the web site operator might hire a content provider to created new content specifically for the web site. Content providers generally want to focus on what they are good at, which is developing content – films, weather forecasts, travel information, educational material and so on.
Content provider

How does Marketing Information System works?

A marketing information system can be defined as a computer based system that works in conjunction with other functional information systems to support the organization’s management in solving problems that related to marketing the firm’s products.

The system should be design to collect and analyze different types of information at all stages of the marketing cycle.

The system includes three subsystems – the accounting information system, marketing research and marketing intelligence.

The marketing people must manage the information flows to aid the decision process. Companies are studying their manager’s information needs and designing marketing information systems (MIS) to meet these needs.

A marketing information system (MIS) consists of people, equipment and procedures to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate and distribute needed, timely and accurate information to marketing decision makers.

To carry out their analysis, planning, implementations and control responsibilities marketing managers need information about development in the marketing environment.

Marketing information has to be produced, stored and distributed, but it has a limited life – it is perishable. Like other resources, information has a value in use; the less the manager knows about a marketing problem and the greater the risk attached to a wrong decision, the more valuable the information becomes.

The role of the MIS is to assess the manager’s information needs, develop the needed information, and distribute the information in a timely fashion to the marketing managers.

The needed information is developed through internal company records, marketing intelligence activities, marketing research and marketing decision support analysis.

The information used for marketing, decisions arrived at from different sources include:
*External environment data
*Marketing research data
*Marketing intelligence data
*Strategic plan
*Transaction processing data
How does Marketing Information System works?

Misappropriation or Theft of Information

The protection of economically valuable data or information, whether proprietary or not, from competitors or potential misuse is an important aspect of the growth and market power of modern companies.

A range of civil an criminal law remedies are available in national legislation to safeguard such information.

The more well known type of loss of information is through plain theft by an insider or a hacker. In the context of internet, there are programs that are capable of retrieving information from a computer, without the user’s knowledge ands ending it to a hacker’s own site.

Any encrypted protective device will be broken by the hacker first before files are stolen. Such programs obviously pose a serious risk of loss of valuable data or information.

Other forms of loss of information are disclosure, whether deliberately or not, by employees or contractual parties or through lapse or oversight of the company.

The disgruntled employee or ne who is offered bribes for passing on secrets is very much the typical miscreant.

Not unexpectedly, although any information of a confidential nature is protected from theft or unauthorized disclosure under laws of one kind of another, the specific laws in each nation differ widely.

Besides the legal redress available under trade secret law, law of confidentiality or other IP laws that pertain to propriety information, there are a range of other laws.

The main legal instrument increasingly being adopted by nations is computer misuse or crime law.
Misappropriation or Theft of Information

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

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

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

Overload of Information

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

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

Managing Information: Accessible Filing

The reason why computers are sure to take over in more and more areas of organizational life is that they can make any information already collected for one purpose instantly available, to be used for many other secondary purposes. This has opened up totally new ways of using information.

Let us take for example the way information about groceries bought by consumers can be used in a retail outlet. In corner shops the proprietor often operates the till and once the customer has paid for his or her purchases the only record of the transaction is on the till roll – to all intents and purposes inaccessible.

It is of little consequence though because the proprietor is close enough to the action for decision making and knows roughly what the day’s taking are, how many customer have been served and whether there has been a run on a particular item.

In the supermarket, however, there may be 30 checkout operators and 10 000 or more different lines stocked. At peak times, purchases may be leaving the supermarket at a rate of 40 000 items per hour.

Stocks of each line must be reordered to arrive at the rate of consumption or changing demand for particular lines caused by promotional; activities or food scarce could be easily lead to empty shelves to throw away ‘till roll’ data collected for the primary purpose of calculating how much to charge the customer.

Once collected it must be used again for stock control, a secondary use. And that’s not the end of the story. Information is expensive to collect, but once held in digital form it costs next to nothing to store and so can be freely used over and over gain for a variety of secondary purpose.

For instance, till roll data collected over a period of months or years can be analyzed for long term trends and presented graphically to aid in forecasting and strategic planning. Till roll data becomes valuables for direct marketing when linked to particular customers who presented a loyalty card.

Customer who buys cat food may be interested in special offers in cat litter, and those who buy diapers may try a new range of baby foods. Their addresses are known, so they can be targeted for mail shots customized to their life styles and preferences.
Managing Information: Accessible Filing

Personal Information Manager

Personal Information Manager is a popular software package for end user productivity and collaborations, and is a popular application for personal digital assistant (PDA) hand held devices.

Personal information manager such as Lotus Organizer and Microsoft Outlook help end users, store, organize and retrieve information about customers, clients and prospects, of schedule and manage appointments, meetings and tasks.

The personal information manager will organize data entered and retrieve information in a variety of forms, depending on the style and structure of the personal information and the information wanted. For example, information can be retrieved as an electronic calendar or list of appointments, meeting, or other things to do, the time tables for a project; or a display of key facts and financial data about customers, clients, or sales prospects.

Personal information managers are sold as independent programs or are included in software suites and vary widely in their styles.

Structure and features, for example, Lotus Organizer uses a notebook with tabs format, while Microsoft Outlook organizes data about people as a continuous A to Z list.

Most personal information managers emphasize the maintenance of contact list, that is, customers, clients or prospects. Scheduling appointments and meetings and task management are top personal information manager applications.

Personal information manager are now changing to include the ability to access the World Wide Web also provide e-mail capability.
Personal Information Manager

Single Database in Organization

One of the reasons that organization were so slow to respond in the past was that they simply did not have a clear view of what was happening within their company. Yes, a large amount of data was available, but it was fragmented around the organization in many different places, different isolated systems and incompatible formats. Additional, the data was inconsistent due to different definitions, cut-off dates and measurement criteria.

Large businesses (and countries) have been traditionally less efficient than smaller organizations due to the cost of coordination and the increase in bureaucracy to deal with large amounts of information. Delegation of authority to compensate for this factor has led to lack of control, lower efficiency and fragmentation of business.

The solution is a single, logical, central database that gives everybody in the organization access to the same data at the same time. Many organizations are now bringing together all their separate systems to achieve this singular view.

A single source of data gives the organization the ability to combine information across all business operations. Whereas managers used to receive a separate printed monthly report from each system, they can now obtain daily, or even hourly, electronic reports that give a single view of what matters, as it happens, across their entire organization.

Chief executive can access a single dynamic report on screen to monitor their critical success factors and key performance indicators, such as sales, leads, liquidity, staffing or inventory levels. These interactive reports allow the user, not just to monitor everything that is important to the company, but also to investigate variances and get immediate answers within a few mouse clicks.

The availability of global information systems enables companies to maintain a functional structure on a large scale, which is more efficient, rather than creating multiple business units with complicated communication cycles.
Single Database in Organization