Unit 1: Business View of Information Technology applications

Business Enterprise Organization

 All the organizations have a structure similar to shown above whether it is service based
or product based.
 Each organization have functions such as product/service research, product manufacture,
quality assurance, purchase, sales, marketing, planning, training etc.
 The business will depend on workforce to carry out the different functions which lead to
new functions such as HR management, IT management, customer relationship
management etc.
 When business expands to multiple services/products and start global operations new
requirements emerges which are known as internal services.
 Functions which cut across various product/service lines such as Training, HR, IT
management, Finance, marketing etc. are known as support units.
 Functions which generate revenue are known as Business units.

Core Business Functions

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Core functions are important for smooth day to day functioning of organization and for
performing task efficiency and on time. Given below is the list of a few common core business
functions:

 Sales and Marketing: The work of this function is to manage its customers, in any
business it is just not enough to have customers but the organization should be able to
retain its customers and grow the customer base. The aim this function is to have loyal
customers coming back to the company with repeat business.
 Product/Service Delivery: The Company makes its revenue either by rendering service or
by selling their products or both. The aim of this function is to deliver the proper
products/services to their customers. It’s about “delivering right product/service to right
customer on right time”.
 Quality: This is the key point on which any organization can be ahead of its competitors.
The aim of this function is to assure the quality of the product/service so that the
customer is satisfied fully.
 Product Development: This function looks after the product development and also plans
for innovative ways to develop innovative products. It could be the same proprietary
product but developed using innovative ways which could be use of automation, reduced
cost and better processes.
 Accounting: For ant business organization it is not unusual for cash to come in for the
products sold or the services rendered. The company needs to account for the cash flow
and also file the tax returns, all these are managed by the accounting function.
 Technology: For any organization technology is very important part because it is helps in
all other functions and make them work smoothly. For example the Accounting function
relies heavily on technology to be able to manage the transactions accurately and timely.
 Human Resource Management: The HR is responsible for hiring, Resource Management
Acquire to Retire (Fixed Assets), Hire to Retire, Business Management Process, Procure
to Pay, training and managing the employees.
 Supplier Management: Each organization has vendor partners to supply the raw material
needed for production. It is very important to manage relationship with them it includes

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calling tenders, giving orders, fixing the cost etc. all these are managed by supplier
management function.
 Legal and Compliance: This function deals with the legal aspects such as making
agreements with customers, employees and vendors, making protocols for smooth
running of the organization etc.
 Corporate Planning: For large sale organizations it is important to take cate of allocation
of resources (both tangible and non-tangible) and manpower to the various
functions/units. It handle internal aspects of the organization.
 Procurement (Purchases): This process deals with the procurement of hardware/software
licenses and other technical.

Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence Framework

Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence Program is a generic model based on Baldrige

Criteria for Performance Excellence. Baldrige Criteria serves as a foundation for a performance
management system. It focus on “Measurement, Analysis and Knowledge Management” and
part of Baldrige Criteria helps us to understand the strategic role of business analytics.

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The Baldrige Performance Excellence model has components which are explained below:

1. Leadership: The leadership criterion describes how personal actions of organizations

senior leaders guide and sustain the organization. And also how the organization fulfils
its social, ethical and legal responsibilities.
Senior Leadership
Senior leadership includes the following:
 Guide the organization.
 Create sustainable organization.
 Communicate and motivate employees.
 Focus on organizational performance.
Governance and Social Responsibility
Corporate Governance and corporate’s social responsibility focus on
 Addressing organizational governance
a. Transparency in operations and disclosure practices.

b. Accountability for management’s actions.

c. Evaluating the performance of CEO and members of governance board.

 Promoting legal and ethical behavior.

 Support of key communities.
2. Strategic Planning: The strategic planning criterion examines how the organization
develops its strategic objectives and how these objectives are implemented.
Strategy Development
The strategy development process of strategic planning includes the following:
 Determination of key strategic objectives with timelines.
 Balancing the needs of all stakeholders.
 Assessing organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
 Risk assessment.
 Changes in the technology trends, markets, competition, and regulatory environment.

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Strategy Deployment
The strategy deployment process of strategic planning includes following:
 Action plan development and deployment
a. Allocating resources accomplishment of the action plan.
b. Allocating human resources accomplish short term and long term goals.
c. Developing performance measure or indicators for tracking the effectiveness and
achievement of the action plan.
 Performance projection: Addressing current gaps in performance with respect to
competition.
3. Customer Focus: The customer focus criterion determines customer requirements, builds
customer relationships and uses customer feedbacks to improve and identify new
opportunities for innovation.
Customer and Market Knowledge
 Identification and determination of target customers and market segments.
 Using feedback to become more focused and satisfy customer needs.
Customer Relationship and satisfaction
 Acquire new customers, meet, and exceed customer’s expectation.
 Implement processes for managing customer complaints effectively and efficiently.
4. Measurement, Analysis and Knowledge Management: This criteria determines how the
organization selects, analyze and improves its data, information and knowledge assets
and how it manages its information technology.
Measurement, Analysis and Improvement of Organizational Performance
 Performance Measurement
a. Collecting, aligning, and integrating data and information.
b. Tracking the overall performance of the organization and the progress relative to strategic
objectives and action plans.
 Performance Analysis, Review and Improvement
a. Assessing the organization's success, competitive performance, and progress on strategic
objectives.
b. Systematic evaluation and improvement of value creation processes.

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Measurement of Information Resources, Information Technology and Knowledge
 Management of Information Resources
a. Making needed data and information available and providing access to workforce.
b. Keeping data and information availability mechanisms, including software and hardware
systems, in tune with business needs and technological changes in the operating
environment.
 Data, Information, and Knowledge Management: Ensuring the following properties of the
organizational data, information, and knowledge
a. Accuracy
b. Integrity and reliability
c. Security and confidentiality
5. Workforce Focus: The Workforce Focus criterion examines the ability to assess the
workforce capability and builds a workforce environment conducive to high
performance.
Workforce Environment
 Focusing on maintaining a good working environment for the employees.
 Recruiting, hiring, and retaining new employees.
 Managing and organizing the workforce.
 Ensuring and improving workplace health, safety and security.
Workforce Engagement
 Fostering an organizational culture conducive to high performance and a motivated
workforce.
 Focusing on the training and education port in the achievement of overall objectives,
including building employee knowledge, skills, and contributing to high performance.
 Reinforcing new knowledge and skills on job.
 Developing personal leadership attributes.
6. Process Management: The Process Management criterion examines how the
organization manages and improves its work systems and work processes to deliver
customer satisfaction and achieve organizational success and sustainability.

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Work System Design
 Determines core competencies of the organization
 Identifies key work processes.
 Determines key work process requirements incorporating inputs from customers.
 Designs and innovates work processes to meet key requirements.
Work Process Management and Improvement
 Implementing the work processes to ensure that they meet design requirements.
 Using key performance measures or indicators for control and improvement of work
processes.
 Preventing defects, service errors, and re-work.
7. Results: The Business Results criterion examines the organization's performance and
improvement in all the key areas - product and process outcomes, customer focused
outcomes, human resource out comes, leadership outcomes and financial outcomes. The
performance level is examined against that of the competitors and other organizations
with similar product offering.

Key purpose of using IT in business:

 All the outset we will start with the idea that IT is used to Automate business processes.
 The use of IT to innovate new ways of doing business results in huge benefits for the
enterprise and gives it leadership position in the market.
 All of us have used software like email, Google search tool, world process, spreadsheet
and presentation tolls that enhance personal productivity.
 Consider an IT application like “Payroll processing". Salary payable to the employees.
To solved this problem Departmental IT Applications have developed.
 On-line Transaction Processing systems:-IT application like train/bus/airline ticket
reservation system. Speed, accuracy, search capability, status inquiry, easy update ability
and so on.
 Business Process/Model Innovation:-book store. We can transfer the money across the
globe to any bank account from home is a new innovation.

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 Decision support: these application need to gather data from various sources, fir them
into the user preferences and present recommendations with ability to show more details
when the user needs it.
 IT application are: office productivity/office automation IT application, departmental It
applications, Enterprise level on-line transaction processing applications, business
process or model Innovation applications, decision support applications.

Characteristics of Internet-ready IT Applications

 Support large number of users of different interests and abilities

 Provides display on multiple devices and formats
 Deployed on large secure servers through license management software
 Support single sign-on and support special authentication & authorization requirements
 Ability to run on any operating system
 Ability to use/connect to any RDBMS for data storage
 Could be implemented in multiple programming languages or combinations as well
 Leverages enterprise storage capabilities and back-up systems
 Supports extensive connectivity to different types of networks and Internet services

Bespoke IT applications development

 A classification based on function and purpose such as office automation business,

Business innovation, Decision support.
 Another key classification based on parameter for IT applications is the users. Like
customer facing, partner/supplier facing and employee facing applications, customer
relationship management, supply chain management, human capital management,
financial accounting, customer order processing, customer order fulfillment, product
distribution management, procurement management.
 As they say are the ones who understand business process steps very well, such
enterprises will invest in hardware software, development tools and testing tools, and
own the entire soft lifecycle responsibility. This is termed as bespoke application
development.

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Following are the few important points that are visualized regarding IT applications

 All the IT application required to run enterprise will never be created at the same time
there will be several generations of application developed or purchased over several
years.
 All IT application need maintenance as business rules and business environment
change and IT application be at a different stage of maintenance at any given point of
time.
 Enterprises choose the optimum hardware, software, OS, RDBMS, network and
programming language available at the time of making build or buy decision.
 Enterprises may have ERP, home-grown applications, partially out sourced or fully
out sourced IT application development.
 Enterprises may loosely bring together several applications in an enterprise portal but
limitations in terms of data exchange across IT applications.
 Enterprise may design new applications to combine data from several critical data
sources the management information system (MIS).

Information Users and their Requirements

 Employees, partners, suppliers, customers, investors, analysts, prospective employees,

and general public interested in the business affairs of the enterprise.
 Office goers, mobile users, home office users, remote securely connected users, casual
visitors to website and digital users who conducted transactions using the internet.
 Role-base users who have access to certain category of IT applications, certain level of
classified information, access to specific system and even specific operations.
 Securely connected users who may be allowed to access specific servers from specific
location.
 Administrative users, who configure the IT environment, manage users’ access control.
 Users who have permission to read or update or have full control over the enterprise
information.
 Knowledge workers/analytical users who discover new patterns in the enterprise data.

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 Multi-device access users who sometimes work in office or other device.

Types of digital data

1. Structured data: This is the data which is in organized form that is in rows and columns
and can be easily used by computer programs.
Sources of structured data: OLTP system, SQL as well as spreadsheets such as excel
etc.
2. Unstructured data: This is data which does not confirm to a data model or which is not
in form which can be used easily by a computer program.
Sources of instructed data: bitmap objects, textual objects
3. Semi structured data: This is the data which does not confirm to a data model but has
some structure
Sources of instructed data: XML, Email, TCP/IP packets, Zipped files, Binary
executables, Mark up languages.

Structured data

Characteristics of Structured data

Structured data is organized in semantic chunks with similar entities grouped together to form
relations or classes.

 Confirms to a data model

 Data stored in the form of rows and columns e.g. relational database

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 Data resides in fixed fields within a record or file
 Definition, format and meaning of data is explicitly known
 Attributes in group are the same
 Similar entities are grouped

Sources of Structured Data

Data coming from databases as Access, OLTP systems, SQL as well spreadsheets such as excel
are all in the structured format. Figure depicts the sources of structured data.

To summarize, structured data

 Consists of fully described data sets.

 Has clearly defined categories and sub-categories.
 Is placed neatly in rows and columns.
 Goes into the records and hence the database is regulated by a well-defined structure.
 Can be indexed easily either by the DBMS itself or manually.

Operations on Structured Data

 Storage: Pre-defined and user-defined data types help with the storage of structured data.
 Scalability: Large amount of data can be handled easily.
 Security: Ensuring security is easy.
 Update and Delete: Updating, deleting, etc. is easy due to structured form.

Hassle-Free Retrieval

 Retrieving information: A well-defined structure helps in easy retrieval of data.

 Indexing and searching: Data can be indexed based not only on a text string but also on
other attributes. This enables streamlined search.
 Mining data: Structured data can be easily mined and knowledge can be extracted from
it.
 BI operations: BI works extremely well with structured data. Hence data mining,
warehousing, etc., can be easily undertaken.

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Unstructured data

Characteristics of unstructured data

 Has no easily identifiable structure

 Does not conform to any data model
 Cannot be stored in the form of rows and columns as in a database
 Not in any particular format or sequence
 Not easily usable by a program
 Does not follow any rules or semantics

Source of unstructured data

 Any data which is in non-database format is unstructured data.

 It can be classified into two categories Bitmap objects (image, video, audio files etc.) and
Textual objects (MS word documents, MS Excel sheets etc.)
 A lot unstructured data is noisy text such as chats, emails and SMS texts.
 Few examples of sources are web pages, Memos, Videos, Images, Body of email, Text
files, Power point presentations, Chats, Reports, White papers, Surveys etc.

How to manage unstructured data

 Indexing: In Relational Database management System data is indexed to enable faster

search and retrieval. Indexes represent a large record in data set. In case of unstructured
data the indexing can be done with the help of file name and text stings in case of text
files.
 Tags/Metadata: Using metadata data in a document can be tagged. In unstructured data
little metadata or no metadata is available. To know the metadata structure of data has to
be identified which is difficult as the data itself has no particular format and is coming
from more than one source.
 Classification /taxonomy: It is classifying data on the basis of the relationships that exist
between data. Data can be arranged in groups and placed in hierarchies based on the
taxonomy prevalent in organization.

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 CAS: Content Addressable Storage stores data based on their metadata and it assigns a
unique name to every object stored in it. The object is retrieved based on its content and
not its location. It is extremely used in storing emails.

Challenges faced while storing unstructured data

 Storage space: It is difficult to store and manage unstructured data. A lot of space is
required to store such data. It is difficult to store image, videos…etc
 Scalability: As the data grows, scalability becomes an issue and the cost of storing such
data grows etc.
 Retrieve information: even if unstructured data is stored, it is difficult to retrieve and
recover from it
 Security: Ensuring security is difficult due to varied sources of data ex: emails,
webpages etc.
 Update and delete: Updating and deleting unstructured data are very difficult as retrieval
is difficult due to no clear structure.
 Indexing and searching: Indexing unstructured data is difficult and error prone as the
structure is not clear and attributes are not pre-defined.

Solutions to storage challenges of Unstructured data

 Changing format: unstructured data may be covered to formats which are easily
managed, stored and searched.
 Developing new hardware: New hardware needs to be developed to support
unstructured data. It may either complement the existing storage devices or may be a
stand- alone for unstructured data.
 Storing in RDBMS: Unstructured data may be stored in relational databases which
support BLOBs, which is in the form of video or image.
 Storing in XML format: Unstructured data may be stored in XML format which tries to
give some structure to it by using tags and emails etc.
 CAS: It organizes files based on their metadata and assigns a unique name to every
object stored in it.

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Extracting Information from stored unstructured data

Challenges

 Interpretation: Unstructured data is not easily interpreted by conventional search

algorithms
 Classification: Different naming conventions followed across the organization make it
difficult to classify.
 Indexing: Designing an algorithms to understand the meaning of the documents and then
tagging is difficult.
 Deriving meaning: Computer programs cannot automatically derive structure from
unstructured data
 Files formats: Increasing number of file formats make it difficult to interpret data
 Tags: As the data grows, it is not possible to put tags manually.

Solutions

 Tags: Unstructured data can be stored in a virtual repository and be automatically tagged.
 Text mining: Text mining tools help in growing as well as classifying unstructured data
and assist in analyzing by considering grammar, context, synonyms etc.
 Application Platforms: Application platforms like XOLAP help extract information
from mail and XML-based documents.
 Classification: Taxonomies within the organization can be managed automatically to
organize data in hierarchical structures.

Semi-structured data

Characteristics of Semi-structured data

 Does not conform to any data model but it contains the tags
 Similar entities are grouped
 Cannot be stored in the form of rows and columns as in a database
 Attributes in a group may not be the same

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 The tags and elements describe data is stored
 Not sufficient meta data

Sources of Semi-structured data

 It is organized into semantic entities

 Similar entities are grouped together
 Entities in the same group may not have same attributes.
 The order of sattributes is not necessarily important.
 Not always all attributes are required.
 Size of the same attributes in a group may differ.
 Type of the same attributes in a group may differ.
 Email, XML, TCP/IP, Zipped files, Binary executives, Mark-up languages, Integration of
data from heterogeneous sources etc. are few sources of semi structured data.

How to manage semi-structured data

 Schemas: These can be used to describe the structure of data. Schema defines the
constraints on the structure, content of the document etc.
 Graph- based data models: These can be used to describe data. This is a schema-less
approach and is known as “self-describing” as data is presented in such a way that it
explains itself.
 XML: This is widely used to store d exchange semi- structured data. It allows the user to
define tags to store data in hierarchical or nested forms.

How to store semi-structured data

Challenges

 Storage Cost: Same query may update both schema and data, updating of schema
frequently is difficult and costly.
 RDBMS: Identifying the relation between the data is difficult because the data don’t have
any particular format.

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 Irregular and Partial structure: As the data comes from different sources it will have
different structures and sometimes no structure at all.
 Implicit structure: The structure of data from some sources is implicit which makes it
very difficult to interpret relationships between data.
 Evolving schemas: The difficulty with schemas is that requirements are ever changing
and the changes required in data also lead to changes in schema.
 Distinction between schema and data: In semi-structured data, schema and data are
tightly coupled so distinction between schema and data is very uncertain.

Solutions to storage challenges

1. XML: It allows to define tags and attributes to store data. Data can be stored in a
hierarchical structure.
2. RDBMS: Semi structured data can be stored in a relational database by mapping the data
to a relational schema which is then mapped to a table.
3. Special purpose DBMS: Database which are specially designed to store semi structured
data.
4. OEM: Data can be stored and exchanged in the form of graph where entities are
represented as objects which are the vertices in a graph.

Extracting Information from Semi-Structured data

Challenges

 Flat files: Semi-structured is usually stored in flat files which are difficult to index and
search.
 Heterogeneous sources: Data comes from varied sources which is difficult to tag and
search.
 Incomplete/Irregular structure: Extracting structure when there is none and
interpreting the relations existing in the structure which is present is a difficult task.

Solutions

 Indexing: Indexing data in a graph- based model enables quick search.

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 OEM: This data modeling technique allows for the data to be stored in graph-based data
model which is easier to index and search.
 XML: It allows data to be arranged in a hierarchical or tree like structure which enables
indexing and searching.
 Mining tools: Various mining tools are available which search data based on graphs,
schemas, structures etc.

Difference between semi-structured and structured data

 Semi-structured data is the same as structured data with one minor exceptions.
 Semi-structured data requires or examining the data element name.
 Semi-structured data is one processing step away from structured data.
 From data point of view, there is no difference between Semi-structured data and
structured data.
 An analyst’s point of view, there is a huge difference because the analyst needs to create
the data elements source/target mapping.

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