Life Through MY EYES

MIS and MIS750 of UiTM had successfully created a big impact on me.  Since beginning of this class, I cannot stop but only excited to find IT / MIS related news.  Yesterday, I read 2 newspaper articles which I found very enlightening and I want to share the joy with all of you.

ARTICLE 1
Title: Single mums pick up ICT know-how, NST, November 7,2011. Page 11

A group of participants (96 single mother and 215 orphans) have been invited to attend one-day workshop on Information and communication technology, organised by University Malaysia Pahang (UMP) in Kuantan.  Many of them are entrepreneur and small business owner. It is a success.  Most of the participants went home with the new knowledge that they can use to explore and prosper their business.  One particular statement from a 50-year old participant that touch my heart is " It is not true that we are not interested in ICT. The reason many of us are not ICT-literate is that we never had the opportunity to learn".  Kudos to UMP and their partners for changing somebody's live. 

ARTICLE 2
Title: Blog of teaching experiences, NST, November 7,2011. Page 13, Life and Times.
Life through my eyes.....this is a title of a book by Muhammad Hafiz Ismail, a teacher in Sekolah Kampung Kenang, a remote orang asli settlement in Kuala Kangsar, Perak.  It's all started when he created a blog (with the same title - despite all odds) as he was new with the remote environment and need to channel his observation and experience.  I read the articles with nothing but amazement to this 25 year old teacher. His `diary' turn to be an award wining blog coveted Prime Minister award at MSC APICTA 2011 recently.  His online reflections not only ramblings about his life in the remote settlement but also a sharing platform for creative teaching methods that he invented to make his classroom a fun learning playground for his students ( he is such a creative teacher). Another feather to his hat, his followers are not just Malaysian but also from Britain, USA, Australia and Africa. You make Malaysia proud Hafiz....Bravo !!!!
To visit Muhammad Hafiz blog, please visit:
www.apistakkisah.blogspot.com


MY TAKE
This blog (MIS and ME) is not my temporary blog, this  blog is here to stay.  

P.S: Dr Norzaidi, salute to you !!!... for `breaking' my fear in ICT.

ONLINE SHOPPING - mudah.com

Afternoon guys!  Here I am and another entry....just to share my experience on online shopping.  I am not sure how many of you know about mudah.com.  Me, i found the website about 6 years ago, when I was thinking of selling a property. It was introduce by a brother in-law.  When I clicked to the website, I found the website as a very `customer friendly' website.  The search was made simple and quick.  They have almost everything that a person need under the sky, from a RM1 pearl grass to million ringgit property or even business outfit.  

mudah.com - virtual hypermarket

What I am interested about mudah.com is not just the variety of items you can find there, but also the business concept adopted.  Mudah.com is a platform for anybody to advertise items for sale, wanted or even announcement. It is a huge virtual hypermarket advertisement with no commission or fee attached.  The purchaser can contact the seller direct and lock the deal themselves.   Until now, mudah.com is still my favourite website, not for the urge to shop but sometimes to see the variety of items on sale.

PS: This is not a marketing campaign on mudah.com though.

MY TAKE

On mudah.com: Over the years, I have seen the website progressed to even `friendlier' with better search facilities.  The categories of items are also expanding. But, hey...take a look !  U may see my handphone number on the seller's details..... 

On online shopping experience: I have been a customer to online shopping for quite a while. Items that I normally purchase online are: airplane ticket (mostly Airasia), books (amazon.com, mph.com - for my daughter), cinema tickets ( family session), train tickets (Eurostars,RailEurope), rent-a-car and accommodation.  All the while, my online purchases was pretty much plain sailing except one.  My only bad experience was from car renting service, AVIS in Paris last February.  I was signing my credit card based on agreed fee (4-days rental, about RM 1,500) but when I received my credit card bill back in Malaysia next 1 month, it was recorded that AVIS actually charged me for almost RM5,000. I was shocked and sad. Luckily I had the copy of the rental agreement intact and wrote the AVIS headquarter in London.  The case took almost 3 months to settle and I finally got back my RM3,500 reverted to my credit card with an official apology note from AVIS London.  Lesson learned - I may have been a victim of online shopping but trusting only to company with credible background save me.  Lucky it was AVIS. I was told  that the `mistake' happened at the handling office in Orly airport Paris.

IT / MIS around ME

MIS 750 has changed me....in a positive way.  I have become `IT / MIS sensitive ' person.  The whole week of this week saw me reading newspaper with IT/MIS as my special interest.  This morning I saw another comment by a writer in Utusan Malaysia about a group of lawyer using facebook to share their syariah court case material with discredit note on the judges.  Social network has been used to expose private and confidential details of clients and the case.  Some lawyers have expressed their concern on this trend which to them is unethical.  Integrity play a very important role here. If a lawyer cannot hold the integrity, who else can we trust?

MY NEW INITIATIVE

CIDB Holdings Homepage

This morning I was talking to our company's IT vendor. I have requested the company to quote me the documentation exercise of all IT/MIS systems that we have in office.  
My employer has established some kind of IT / MIS initiative in mostly piece meal basis.  We have biometric entrance cum attendance  system in-place just 2 months ago, MYOB accounting system and intranet. We have even developed a Seminar Registration System (we conducted many in-house events).  But all this while, we have never documented any of this initiatives and that is exactly what I want to do immediately.

I am also doing some research on IT / IS securities for our group presentation which schedule this 20 November.  I am now becoming more concern with my company's information security and want to ensure that we are well protected.  The last big `system crash' that we have experienced was in 2004 when a virus that rename most of the files in our file server and made all files with 0 bytes. We installed MS ISA firewall 2004 to ensure the incidents will not recur. The 2nd attack we experienced is to our e-mail server in 2006.  This spamming congested the server.  It has restricted access to server, network access becoming very slow and our e-mail has been blacklisted.  To counter this problem, we authenticated user to the server and since then, we have not experience any major problem to our IT system anymore (thank you Rizal from Rsystect that explained the situation to me this morning).

MY TAKE
MIS 750 has changed me. I like to announce that I am now a blogger. I can understand MIS better and definitely not 'afraid' of IT anymore. You will see me more, certainly!

ps: Dr Norzaidi, thank you for your easy-casual way of teaching MIS. You make MIS750 sound less intimidating and scary. 
 

THE SOCIAL NETWORK - SMART PHONE - My Take

As I was reading newspaper on last Saturday (29 Oct, NST) under 1Klassifieds page, the title of the discussion captured my eye.  THE SOCIAL NETWORK. I somehow got occupied the whole day (preparing for my EMBA mid-term exam the next day ....he..he )and save the paper for my 4th entry to this blog. On exam day...what? The same title appear in Question 4. I feel like crying. Why am I not reading the article on Saturday when I found it ? Well, cannot allow my self to regret for too long....mid-term exam is now over ( Dr Norzaidi, please have mercy on me !!!!).  Lesson learned - DON'T PROCRASTINATE...


ARTICLE 1

I have gathered the positive impact of that social network can contribute to a person. 
1) For an individual, you may find others who have similar interest, to make friends and build business.

Six Degree of Separation, Source: Wikipedia

2) For an enterprise, you can lower the cost of advertising, building credibility as you connect with the prospects on a personal level, and expanding the circle of you know through Six Degrees of Separation**.


The article is based on an interview between the writer, Mr Gerald Chuah and Mr Vincent Cheng, Principal Consultant and CEO of JeVince Solutions, an expert on online coaching  programmes and a founder of 3 successful Facebook Community Fan Page, namely Malaysian Business Network (20,000 members), Global Internet Marketing network (24,000 members) and GlobalInternetMarketingNetwork (13,000 members). 


ARTICLE 2

On the same day, I also read another article from Utusan Malaysia title ` Antisosial kerana Blackberry' by a young Malaysian artist named Neelofa. She wrote about the effect of the smart phone Blackberry (BB) that has stormed the Malaysian society lately.

Among her concern are:-

• BB brought the distance closer
• BB also brought the `close'  to a distance.  She shared her experienced during last hari raya in Pasir Mas when all her family members are so busy on BBM (blackberry messages) and left her grandparents sad and ignored.
• BB has `charmed' many people and to the extend that UAE and Saudi Arabia has put a banned on BB.  The exclusivity communication and transaction over BB that channeled straight to the HQ in Canada might trigger so many negative activities by some quarters.

MY TAKE
On the positive note, Social Networking is a good medium to promote YOU  as an expert in the community you founded.  Communities Creates Opportunities.
On the other direction, it can also provide negative impact for example the teenager that spend more time on facebook, friendster or twitter than reading books, study or even helps with household chores, or staff in office that spend on chatting and facebook or even on handphone in every opportunity until neglecting the works.
To me, the most important is the balance that we take between technology and other important matters in life.

LESSON OF THE DAY
I have picked up new knowledge today, Six degrees of separation. 

** Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, "a friend of a friend" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy and popularized by a play written by John Guare, source: wikipedia).

MIS and Me

When this assignment (creating a blog with minimum of 5 entry) was given to all EMBA7713A UiTM group by our Assoc. Prof Dr Norzaidi about 3 weeks ago, I felt I was pushed to a corner and cannot move....I don't know how to start and what to do.  For one, I was not and IT person, second, i was never involved `deeply' in any of company's IT project or fully understand what MIS is all about.  Being in a rather small company (21 staff company) and a holding company in nature, IT was never really our company's priority. I am on my computer only when I was really need to.  My exposure was limited to my e-mail (which I m quite used to and depended on most of the time) and facebook (because I need to check what is in the mind of my kids - 6 of them).  Creating a blog ?

After `soul-IT-searching' for quite a while, I have the courage to start this blog about 10 days ago.  To create this blog, I was tutored by my 14 year-old daughter, whom I didn't know having a blog herself before this assignment (this is when a computer-savy daughter come handy !!!!..he..he )  Before this entry, I didn't even know what to write. I ended up putting 2 entry which soon I will edit or delete...not because it is not useful neither it is not MIS related, but because it is not `interesting enough', as my daughter put it. So, this is my 3rd entry, which I hope will be more meaningful but at the same time, it give me more understanding of what MIS is all about.

This entry is about an article I read with the hope it will educate me further on what  MIS is and how it is important in business decision making (which I hope I can use it in my working environment).  The journal was written by Srinivas Nowduri from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and tittle Management information systems and business decision making: review, analysis and  recommendations.


THE ARTICLE
In summary, Information Systems can be conceptualized in terms of three types of systems: Transactional Processing Systems (TPS), Management Information Systems (MIS), and Expert Systems. MIS has several subsets such as Decision Support Systems and Executive Information Systems. The role of MIS in decision support is discussed in the context of the subset referred to as Decision Support System (DSS).   In order to define MIS, it must be principally divided into the three facets that constitute it—which are: management, information, and systems (Kumar, 2006), . From the discussion, MIS has been referred to a system that uses information in order to ensure apt management of businesses. Fundamentally, all the facets of MIS run concomitantly in order to ensure overall efficiency of the whole system. Failure in one part means overall failure for the other parts since they are all designed to function interdependently (Davenport & Short, 1990).  The paper provide plenty of discussion on the positive contribution of MIS to decision making at the same time the challenges that are believed to limit the efficacy of MIS. But one thing I could totally agree that paper quote `A good management of information systems leads to good decision- making in business just in the same way poor management leads to poor decision making'.  

The full paper can be retrieve from: www.aabri.com/manuscripts/10736.pdf 


Happy reading !
p.s:   For a rookie like me, this short article provide enough explanation on what is MIS and how it may affect the business decision in an organisation. Am I a blogger now? YES !!!!  Thank you Dr Norzaidi !. I wouldn't even try to blog if it is not because of this assignment.