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.

WHY DO PEOPLE USE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

This paper give a good idea on why we use IT...in a very interesting research

ABSTRACT
Information systems (IS) implementation is costly and has a relatively low success rate. Since the seventies, IS research has contributed to a better understanding of this process and its outcomes. The early efforts concentrated on the identification of factors that facilitated IS use. This produced a long list of items that proved to be of little practical value. It became obvious that, for practical reasons, the factors had to be grouped into a model in a way that would facilitate analysis of IS use.

In 1985, Fred Davis suggested the technology acceptance model (TAM). It examines the mediating role of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness in their relation between systems characteristics (external variables) and the probability of system use (an indicator of system success). More recently, Davis proposed a new version of his model: TAM2. It includes subjective norms, and was tested with longitudinal research designs. Overall the two explain about 40% of system’s use. Analysis of empirical research using TAM shows that results are not totally consistent or clear. This suggests that significant factors are not included in the models.

We conclude that TAM is a useful model, but has to be integrated into a broader one which would include variables related to both human and social change processes, and to the adoption of the innovation model.


get the full paper from here: http://cgit.nutn.edu.tw:8080/cgit/PaperDL/TKW_091103123822.PDF

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND HOW WE ADOPT IT

Information Technology ---->> What we know. erm how do we approach it. I would like to share this article with those who wants to know more.

This article is about how we evaluate the roles of Information System, How it contributes to our organization...happy reading folks ... 

ABSTRACT

Despite significant progress in evaluating the productivity payoffs from information technology (IT), the inability of traditional firm-level economic analysis to fully account for the intangible impacts of IT has led to calls for a more inclusive and comprehensive approach to measuring IT business value. In response to this call, we develop a process-oriented model to assess the impacts of IT on critical business activities within the value chain. Our model incorporates corporate goals for IT and management practices as key determinants of realized IT payoffs. Using survey data from 304 business executives worldwide, we found that corporate goals for IT can be classified into one of four types: unfocused, operations-focus, market-focus and dual-focus. Our analysis confirms that these goals are a useful indicator of payoffs from IT in that executives in firms with more focused goals for IT perceive greater payoffs from IT across the value chain. In addition, we found that management practices such as strategic alignment and IT investment evaluation contribute to higher perceived levels of IT business value.

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9193h7v4.pdf