Knowledge Management System, Potential Threats to E-Commerce, Risk Analysis in Information Systems - Literature review Example

TITLE: Information System Survey. STUDENT NAME: STUDENT NO: DECLARATION: Table of Contents Title Page 1.1 What is a revenue model and how does it relate to business Model. 3 1.2 Regulations that are considered to be potential threats to e- commerce? 3 1.3 Difference between a forward auction and a reverse auction in e-auctions 4 1.4 List and describe the primary threats to information Systems Security. 4 1.5 Explain why it is necessary in conducting a risk analysis as a first step in creating an information systems security plan. 5 1.6 Contrast technological safeguards and human safeguards in information systems security, using examples to illustrate your point. 5 1.6 Contrast technological safeguards and human safeguards in information systems security, using examples to illustrate your point. 5 1.7 Describe the difference between online processing and batch processing using an example of each to illustrate your answer. 6 1.8 Explain what are the models used in decision support system architectures 6 1.9 How can data mining and visualization be used to gain business intelligence and improve decision making. 7 2.0 What is knowledge management system and what types of technologies would make up a comprehensive knowledge management system? 7 2.1 Describe what enterprise systems are and how they have evolved. 8 1.1 What is a revenue model and how does it relate to business Model. Many companies have been selling their goods and services on the internet by adopting a number of strategies to drive in revenue to their businesses. However it is not only the selling of goods and services that can drive money to an organization but also the adopting modern online practices. If a business model is the buying and selling of goods online via the internet then there are quite a number of channels that the business can follow in order to gain additional revenue for itself. To begin with, the established business can make money by buying goods online at a cheaper price in wholesale and re-selling them at a higher price as wholesale, this is mainly applicable to businesses dealing with consumer goods such as computers, books and apparels. A company may also use the advertisement revenue model approach, this is mostly applicable if the mother organization is in the print business, a website may provide free content to its visitors, in which they may also offer some form of advertisements such as banners, this approach is mostly suitable for the newspaper publishers, advertising websites and internet portals such as the yahoo. There is the advertising-subscription revenue model, this is when visitors of a particular website are required to pay a fee and accept some level of advertising, the visitors also may be offered some free content at the online site, examples include New York Times and the wall street journal. A business can also offer services and charge a fee based on the number of transaction processed, these types of businesses may involve travel agency, share trading companies, event ticketing companies, banking and financial services, online games where people pay to play some specific games, concerts and films may also be offered online via streaming video so that people may pay and watch, and finally professional services such as accounting, medical and legal services may be offered online at a certain fee. 1.2 What are the regulations that are considered to be potential threats to e-commerce? Online business has boomed and led to the mushrooming of underground virtual business, and in a response to that, there is the ever growing concern that some of the online consumers would easily become victims of the underground virtual businesses. Since most of the online businesses were very hard to be traced back in case they went underground, legislative authorities across the world decided to introduce different set of regulations which would help online consumers. These laws seeks to encourage the usage of electronic commerce and enhancing consumer confidence by portraying all rights and obligations of both business and virtual consumers. However, some of these regulations are threatening the exchange of goods and services. First and foremost, Since online business, resembles traditional brick and mortar business, for companies located within the jurisdiction of sales taxes they as well need to remit taxes collected on their sales to their governments, this has therefore prevented online companies from gaining competitive advantages from their traditional brick and mortar rivals, (William, 116) The online businesses also needs to have a digital certificate authentification from a recognized organization such as “VeriSign”. These certificates will enable online consumers to trust that particular online store since their personal details such as credit card numbers will be safely. Acquiring some of these certification is proving very costly for some online companies especially the start ups. 1.3 Explain the difference between a forward auction and a reverse auction in the context of e-auctions. In forward Auction, the seller offers goods and services for sale, many buyers just bid for the particular product being sold, increasing their bids systematically by offering the same amount, a higher amount or even a much lower amount for the purpose of winning the bid. At the end of the auctioning period the seller will accept a bid from one of the bidders. The seller is not in any way bound to accept any bid neither the highest nor the lowest. Examples include of forward auction include; The English Auction where bidding starts at a minimal price and increases with every new bid by a fixed amount until the seller is satisfied to award a winner from amongst the bidders . There is also the Japanese auction, here the bidding will always start at a very low price and it will increase at a regular increment, each and every buyer is bound to present a bid at every stage during the auction, and in the end the winning bidder will be awarded. In the Dutch auction, bidding starts at the highest price a bidder will accept and it is lowered until the most friendly prices bidders will accept or feel comfortable with, it is mostly used for perishable items. Some of the forward auctions companies include e-bay and webidz. In Reverse Auction several sellers offer their items for bidding and they usually compete for a price which is only acceptable by the buyer. The buyer can either accept all the bids or reject them all. A good example is the supply contract or construction. It is also known as the business to consumer auction. Buyers here announce their need for a particular product or service, in which later suppliers come on and bid to fulfill that particular bidding need, traditionally they mainly award new business to the supplier with the lowest bid. This is mostly used in the computer services industry such as software development and technical writing, examples of reverse auction companies include lime exchange and get a freelancer.com. 1.4 List and describe the primary threats to information Systems Security. Information systems can be defined as the electronic system containing all the network of the communication system being used internally and externally within an organization. Despite the benefits being presented by modern information System it has some drawbacks such as, computer viruses, these are malicious computer programs that come in different varieties mainly with a purpose of destroying the information in our computer system the programs may be sent and executed remotely by our business competitors in order to gain a competitive advantage by frustrating our efforts. Hackers with financial motives, these are people located remotely from our physical system, they illegally gain access to our system with the motive of gaining financial information such as bank account numbers, credit card numbers and bank pass book numbers, they can later on use this information to purchase goods and services over the internet without the knowledge of the genuine owners. Identity theft, this is also very common, an impostor obtains key information from a regular user without his knowledge and pretends to be the genuine user, in order to persuade a third party that he is the genuine user, he then finally uses this particular information to obtain credit, merchandise and services in the name of the victim. Others include adware’s, this are malicious programs that steals a person’s browsing behavior sending them to a third party whom eventually illegally broadcasts to him adverts pertaining to his frequent browsing areas. Others include malwares and physical theft of the computer system. 1.5 Explain why it is necessary in conducting a risk analysis as a first step in creating an information systems security plan. Mind tools (2009) In order for an information system to succeed there must be a proper risk analysis so that all the factors that are likely to jeopardize the success of the new envisaged system are completely mitigated. We need to embrace a facilitated risk analysis process, we need to identify the current threats this can be; human factors:- the individuals or the organizations whom are involved in the project, operational factors:- disruption of supplies and service delivery, Reputation:- this could lead to losing a business partner, lack of employee confidence and also dwindling market share, others may include the financial, technical and political factors associated with the introduction of new product into the market. You need to estimate the risk associated, you need to analyze the possibility of the threat occurring and how much it will cost the organization. Doug (1998) the most risk an Information system is likely to expose to the company is unexpected change in revenue and cost associated with implementation of the envisaged system especially when the project goes beyond the scheduled timeframe, intellectual property rights have to be addressed. There is also the likely hood that there might be lack of incompetent staffs to manage the new information system, this may force the company in hiring outside consultants who may be very expensive for the organization, also companies’ data will be too much exposed to people outside the organization, this might eventually lead to a security lapse in future. 1.6 Contrast technological safeguards and human safeguards in information systems security, using examples to illustrate your point. In order for proper technological security control to be established within an organization there needs to be automatic safeguards from the system and a restricted control from the human side. With automatic safeguards or rather technological safeguards, there are standards and procedures that needs to be implemented, first and foremost the access control should be able to allow unique user identification, it should also contain an emergency access mechanism, an automatic logging off mechanism, encryption and decryption of data. There is also need for the audit controls, a person or entity should be authenticated before using the system and also the transmission and security of the data within the information system should be addressed. David (2008) when it comes to security at a human level or rather human safeguarding, each system user must have a defined job title, system users should not be accorded with a lot of privileges in accessing the data and altering it at any given time they feel like. Each and every employee before being hired should be thoroughly screened, and all employees working with the system should be regularly screened depending on the level of data they are handling. Employees also need to be conversant with the policies pertaining to the usage of the system and they should strictly adhere to the policies themselves, they should also be constantly refreshed on the policies pertaining to the information system usage and at the end of the day they are expected to pass through some given sets of compliance mechanism in order to continue using the system. All human working with the system should not be allowed to work within it for very long period of time, there should be at least some termination from the job, whether it is voluntarily from the employee or being forced out by the management. E.g. retiring or departmental transfer. 1.7 Describe the difference between online processing and batch processing using an example of each to illustrate your answer. Uwe (2002) online processing is processing of information as they are entered into the computer system, it happens in a real time environment. It has to be processed immediately the data is got. Online data processing enables decision makers to gain faster insight into their problems since all the data is stored and retrieved in a database engine in which also an analysis of the stored data is performed. Online processing is mainly used in banks, supermarkets, and in airline industries. On the other hand batch processing is executing programs without the intervention of human beings. The input data is usually pre- selected through scripts, a program will input a set of data automatically, process the data and eventually produce an output of the data files. This type of an operating environment is known as the batch processing since all the data being entered are first collected into batches on files in which later on they are eventually processed in batches by the computer program. It has several advantages compared to its sister online processing. There is the sharing of system resources among different users. Most of the jobs processing functions are performed when the computer resources are not very occupied. Since it has a very high overall rate of computer utilization the cost of a computer system is amortized. Since there is no minute by minute human supervision on the computer system, the computing resources rarely become idle. 1.8 Explain what are the models used in decision support system architectures In order for a decision support system to function effectively and efficiently it needs combinations of three fundamental components. 1. The Database: - It is simply an electronic collection of some inter-related data for the sole purpose of providing data for various uses among different users. 2. The user interface:-This is the platform which a user will use to interact with the system, it consists of the input which could be in form of commands, punch cards or interactive menus. The input enables the human to give instruction to the computer system. It also has the output, this allows the system to give out the end result of processing to the user or rather the feedback, it may be through a computer monitor, blinking display lights or sound from a speaker. 3. The model: - There needs to be some form of generating some abstract, graphical, conceptual and mathematical models. There should eventually also be a way of reading elements easily that have been broken into their simplest form. . 1.9 How can data mining and visualization be used to gain business intelligence and improve decision making. DJ hand (2001) Data mining is the extracting of some hidden data particularly in a large database system with the sole purpose of analyzing some information from the acquired data. The acquired data can help a business predict a certain future trend among its product portfolio, enabling a business to make a timely and a pro-active knowledge driven decision. Data mining enables an automated prediction of business trends and behaviors, businesses are in a position of really establishing predictive information from very large database systems quickly, they are also in a position of forecasting issues such as bankruptcy and other forms of defaults and even identifying a particular segment of a population that is likely to respond to a certain given event. E.g. in email marketing campaigns. Data mining can also help in the discovery of previously unknown patterns, the tools crawl in the data base and come out with much hidden patterns in an instance .e.g. it can be used in retail to discover seemingly unrelated products that are often purchased by a shopper together. They could also detect fraudulent credit/debit card transactions. Data mining techniques are mostly used in the financial industry such as banks where there is stiff competition and information intensive industries such as the electronic mail campaigns. 2.0 What is knowledge management system and what types of technologies would make up a comprehensive knowledge management system? Dr. David (2008)Knowledge management is making the best use of the available know how within an organization and knowledge management systems are the information system technologies that enhance the usage of available knowhow within the organization. Knowledge management touches on quite a number of business operations, there is the creation of knowledge database, effective management of the information, incorporating the knowledge into viable business process, introduction of technologies that collaborate, and augmenting the decision support processes. However there are some technologies that would make up an effective knowledge management solution, with the impact of each technology varying enormously from a particular situation to another. Some of the technologies that would make up an effective knowledge management system include: Internet/intranet:-Here users are able to access information at any place any time, even via mobile digital devices. It has the advantages that most modern browsers and software’s are able to access information from very many different formats, emails and discussion groups also have some immediate but short time impact among the users. Groupware-Lotus Notes:-These are simply discussion databases, this can be used to access current news feed in areas of interest, and it also contains the multiple view feature which is very unique in accessing vast amount of information. Intelligent agents:-They can represent conceptual images between various sources, they can also help in developing cognitive maps. Document Management:-Most documents are in a form that may allow the sharing of knowledge, with their annotating and their redlining capability they can be easily used as a knowledge repository tools whereby the latest article is shared among and within the project members. 2.1 Describe what enterprise systems are and how they have evolved. Enterprise systems are information Technology systems that are used primarily among various different organizations. They come in different forms and different versions. They can be used to solve a variety of tasks such as cash flow projection, data mining, payroll processing, and computer aided manufacturing, sales analysis e.t.c. They have been forced to evolve due to the increasing business needs among different organizations across the world, The advent of some of the technological practices such as the internet and the need to be mobile at any place and any time led to the evolution of enterprises class products, there is email on the go e.g blackberry devices, there is also the possibilities of analyzing companies data via hand held mobile devices. New technology as well as new competition has also forced companies to be more innovative, this has led to things such as the artificial neural networks and systems that posses data mining capabilities. Also the need to share different business data across many different departments of the organization across the globe has led to the viability of new technology to be developed and this has really helped in evolving the present technology. REFFERENCES. 1. William M. Pride, Robert James Hughes, Jack R. Kapoor, Business illustrated, 7th Edition: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2009. 2. Mind tools, Risk analysis techniques (2009) Retrieved September 22, 2009. 3. http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_07.htm 4. Wikipedia, Wikipedia risk analysis (2009) Retrieved September 22, 2009 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_analysis_%28Business%29 6. David Kroenke, Experiencing Management of Information System, Illustrated edition: Prentice Hall PTR, 2008. 7. Uwe Rohm, Online Analytical Processing With a Cluster of Databases. (2002) IOS Press 8. D. J. Hand, Heikki Mannila, Padhraic Smyth Principles of Data Mining, Illustrated edition.MIT Press (2001). 9. Dr David J. Skyrme, knowledge management solutions- the role of technology, Knowledge Management Solutions-the IT contribution (2008) Retrieved September 22, 2009. 10. http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:nT6I7ZzTfEsJ:www.skyrme.com/pubs/acm0398.doc+knowledge+management+technologies&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ke 11. Doug Hubbard, Hurdling risk CIO magazine(1998). Read More