Chapter 14. Creating Collaborative Partnerships

Bismillahirrahmanirrahimmm....

Teams, Partnerships and Alliances

• Organizations create and use teams, partnerships and alliances to :
  - Undertake new initiatives
  - Address both minor and major problems
  - Capitalize on significant opportunities
• Organizations create teams, partnerships, and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organizations
• Collaboration system - supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and the flow of information.

• Organizations from alliances and partnerships with other organizations based on their core competency
  - Core competency - an organization's key strength, a business function that it does better than any of its competitors
  - Core competency strategy - organizations chooses to focus specifically on its core competency and forms partnerships with other organizations to handle nonstrategic business processes
• Information technology can make a business partnership easier to establish and manage
  -  Information partnership - occurs when two or more organizations cooperate by integrating their IT systems, thereby providing customers with the best of what each can offer
• The internet has dramatically increased the ease and availability for IT-enabled organizational alliances and partnerships

Collaboration Systems

• Collaboration solves specific business tasks such as telecommuting, online meetings, deploying applications, and remote project and sales management
• Collaboration system - an IT-based set of tools that supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information
• Two categories of collaboration :
  i) Unstructured collaboration ( Information collaboration ) - includes document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums, e-mail
  ii) Structured collaboration (process collaboration) - involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which knowledge is hardcoded as rules 
• Collaborative business functions :

• Collaboration systems include :
  - Knowledge management systems
  - Content management systems
  - Workflow management systems
  - Groupware systems

Knowledge Management Systems

• Knowledge management (KM) - involves capturing, classifying, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing information assets in a way that provide context for effective decisions and actions
• Knowledge management system - supports the capturing and use of an organization's "know-how"
• Intellectual and knowledge-based assets fall into two categories :
  i) Explicit knowledge - consists of anything that can be documented, archived, and codified, often with the help of IT
  ii) Tacit knowledge - knowledge contained in people's heads

• The following are two practices for transferring or recreating tacit knowledge
  - Shadowing - less experienced staff observed more experienced staff to learn how their more experienced counterparts approach their work
  - Joint problem solving - a novice and expert work together on a project
• Reasons why organizations launch knowledge management programs :
  - Increase profits and revenues
  - Rotain key talent and expertise
  - Improve customer retention and/or satisfaction
  - Defend market share against new entrants
  - Accelerate time to market with products
  - Penetrate new market segments
  - Reduce cost
  - Develop new products and services

KM Technologies

• Knowledge management systems include :
  - Knowledge repositories (database)
  - Expertise tools
  - E-learning applications
  - Discussion and chat technologies
  - Search and data mining tools

KM and Social Networking

• Finding out how information flows through an organization
  - Social networking analysis (SNA) - a process of mapping a group's contacts (whether personal or professional) to identify who knows whom and who works with whom
  - SNA provides a clear picture of how employees and divisions work together and can help identify key experts

Social networking

Content Management

• Content management system (CMS) - provides tools to manage teh creation , storage, editing, publication of information in a collaborative environment
• CMS marketplace includes :
  - Document management system (DMS)
  - Digital asset management system (DAM)
  - Web content management system (WCM)
• Document management system (DMS)- Supports the electronic capturing, storage distributions, archival and accessing of documents
• Digital Asset management systems (DAM)- Similar to DMS, generally works with binary rather than text files, such as multimedia files types
• Web Content management systems (WCM)- Adds an additional layer to document and digital asset management that enables publishing content both to intranets and to public Web sites
• Content management system vendor overview

Working Wikis

• Wikis - Web-based tools that make it easy for users to add, remove, and change online content
• Business wikis - collaborative Web pages that allows users  to edit documents, share ideas, or monitor the status of a project

Workflow Management Systems 

• Work activities can be performed in series or in parallel that involves people and automated computer systems
• Workflow - defines all the steps or business rules, from beginning to the end, required for a business process
• Workflow management system - facilitates the automation and management of the business processes and controls the movement of work through the business process
• Messaging-based workflow system - sends work assignments through an e-mail system
• Database-based workflow management system - stores documents in a central location and automatically asks the team members to access the document when it is their turn to edit the document

Groupware Systems

• Groupware technologies

• Groupware - software that supports team interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling, and videoconferencing

• Videoconferencing - a set of interactive telecommunication technologies that allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously
• Web conferencing - blends audio, video and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms where people "gather" at a password-protected Web site.
• Instant messaging - type of communications services that enables someone to create a kind of private chat room with another individual to communicate in real-time over the internet
  - E-mail is the dominant form of collaboration application,  but real-time collaboration tools like instant messaging are creating a new communication dynamic
  

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Chapter 13 . E-Business

E-Business

• The internet is a powerful channel that presents new opportunities for an organization to :
  - Touch customers
  - Enrich products and services with infomation
  - Reduce costs

E-Commerce and E-Business

• How do e-commerce and e-business differ?
  - E-commerce - the buying and selling of goods and services over the internet (online transaction)
  - E-business - the conducting of business on the internet including, not only buying and selling, but also serving customers and collaborating with business partners (online transactions, serving customers and collaborating with business partners)

E-Business

• Industries Using E-business

E-Business models

• E-business model - an approach to conducting electronic business on the internet

• Business-to-business (B2B) - Applies to businesses buying from and selling to each other over the internet
• Business-to-consumer (B2C) - Applies to any business that sells its products or services to consumers over the internet 
• Consumer-to-business (C2B) - Applies to any consumer that sells a product or service to a business over the internet
• Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) - Applies to sites primarily offering goods and services to assists consumer interacting with each other over the internet

Business-to-Business (B2B)

• Electronic marketplace (e-marketplace) - interactive business communities providing a central market where multiple buyers and sellers can engage in e-business activities

Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

• Common B2C e-business models include :
  - e-shop - a version of a retail store where customers can shop at any hour of the day without leaving their home or office
  - e-mall - consists of a number of e-shops, it serves as a gateway through which a visitor can access other e-shops
• Business types :
  - Brick-and-mortar business - operates in a physical store without an internet presence
  e.g : Bata
  - Pure-play business - a business that operates on the internet only without a physical store.
  e.g : Amazon.com and Expedia.com
  - Click-and-mortar business - a business that operates in a physical store and on the internet.
  e.g : Hijabs by Hanami

Consumer-to-Business (C2B)

• Priceline.com is an example of a C2B e-business model
• The demand for C2B e-business will increase over the next few years due to customer's desire for greater convenience and lower prices

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C)

• Online auctions :
  - Electronic auction (e-auction) - Sellers and buyers solicit consecutive bids from each other and prices are determined dynamically
  - Forward auction - Sellers use as a selling channel to many buyers and the highest bid wins
  - Reverse auction - Buyers use to purchase a product or service, selecting the seller with the lowest bid
• C2C communities include :
  - Communities of interest - People interact with each other on specific topics, such as golfing and stamp collecting
  - Communities of relations - People come together to share certain life experiences, such as cancer patients, senior citizens, and car enthusiasts
  - Communities of fantasy - People anticipate in imaginary environments, such as fantasy football teams and playing one-on-one with Michael Jordan

E-Business Benefits

• Highly accessible
  - Businesses can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year
• Increased customer loyalty
  - Additional channels to contact, respond to, and access customers helps contribute to consumer loyalty
• Improved information content
  - In the past, customers had to order catalogs or travel to a physical facility before they could compare price and product attributes. Electronic catalogs and web pages present customers with updated information in real-time about goods, services and prices
• Increase convenience
  - E-business automates and improves many of the activities that make up a buying experience
• Increased global reach
  - Businesses, both small and large can reach new markets
• Decreased cost
  - The cost of conducting business on the internet is substantially smaller than traditional forms of business communication

E-Business Challenges

• Identifying Limited Market Segments
  - The main challenge of e-business is the lack of growth in some sectors due to product or service limitation
• Managing Consumer Trust
  - Internet marketers must develop a trustworthy relationships to make that initial sale and generate customer loyalty
• Ensuring consumer Protection
  - Implement Internet Security, protect the misuse of customer information
• Managing Consumer Trust
  - Companies that operate online must obey a patchwork of rules about which customers are subject are subject to sales tax on their purchase and which are not

E-Business Benefits and Challenges

• There are numerous advantages and limitations in e-business revenue models including :
  - Transaction fees
  - License fees
  - Subscription fees
  - Value-added fees
  - Advertising fees

Mashups

• Web mashup - a Web site or Web application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service
  - Application programming interface (API) - a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications
  - Mashup editors - WYSIWYGs (What You See Is What You Get) for mashups

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Chapter 12 . Integrating the organization from End to End - Enterprise resource planning

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

• At the heart of all ERP systems is the database, when a users enters or updates information in one module, it is immediately and automatically update throughout the entire system.

• ERP systems automate business process

Bringing the Organization Together

• ERP - the organization before ERP

• ERP - bringing the organization together

The Evolution of ERP

Integrating SCM, CRM,and ERP

• SCM, CRM, and ERP are the backbone E-business
• Integration of these applications is the key to success for many companies
• Integration allows the unlocking of information to make it available to any user, anywhere, anytime
• SCM and CRM market overviews 

• General audience and purpose of SCM, CRM and ERP

Integration tools

• Many companies purchase modules from an ERP vendor, and SCM vendor, and a CRM vendor and must integrate the different modules together
  - Middleware - several different types of software which sit in the middle of and provide connectivity between two or more software applications
  - Enterprise application integration (EAI) middleware - packages together commonly used functionality which reduced the time necessary to develop solutions that integrate application from multiply vendors
• Data points where SCM, CRM, and ERP integrate :

Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) 

• ERP systems must integrate various organization process and be :
  - Flexible
  - Modular and open
  - Comprehensive
  - Beyond the company
• Flexible - must be able to quickly respond to the changing needs of the organization
• Modular and open - must have and open system architecture, meaning that any module can be interface, with or detached the other modules
• Comprehensive - must be able to support a variety of organizational functions for a wide range of businesses
• Beyond the company - must support external partnerships and collaboration efforts

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Explosive Growth

• SAP boasts 20000 installations and 10 million users worldwide
• ERP solutions are growing because :
  - ERP is logical solution to the mess of incompatible applications that had sprung up in most businesses
  - ERP addresses the need for global information sharing and reporting
  - ERP is used to avoid the pain and expense of fixing legacy systems

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Chapter 11 . Building a Customer-centric Organization - Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

• CRM enables an organization to :
  - Provide better customer service
  - Make call centers more efficient
  - Cross sell products more effectively
  - Help sales staff close deals faster
  - Simplify marketing and sales processes
  - Discover new customers
  - Increase customer revenues

Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value

• Organizations can find their most valuable customers through "RFM" : Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value
  - How recently a customer purchased items (RECENCY)
  - How frequently a customer purchased items (FREQUENCY)
  - How much a customer spends on each purchase (MONETARY VALUE)

The Evolutionary of CRM

• CRM reporting technology - help organizations identify their customers across other applications
• CRM analysis technology - help organization segment their customers into categories such as best and worst customers
• CRM predicting technology - help organizations make predictions regarding customer behavior such as which customers are at risk of leaving
• Three phases in the evolution of CRM include reporting, analyzing, and predicting

The ugly side of CRM

• customer can do a viral to make the business bankruptcy.

Customer Relationship Management's Explosive Growth

• CRM business drivers
  - Automation/productivity/efficiency
  - Competitive advantage
  - Customers demands/requirements
  - Increase revenues
  - Decrease costs
  - Customer support
  - Inventory control
  - Accessibility
• Forecasts for CRM spending (in billion)

Using Analytical CRM to Enhance Decisions

• Operational CRM - supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers.
• Analytical CRM - supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers.
• Operational CRM and analytical CRM :

Customer Relationship Management Success Factors

• CRM success factors include :
  - Clearly communicate the CRM strategy
  - Define information needs and flows
  - Build and integrated view of the customer
  - Implement in iterations
  - Scalability for organizational growth
  

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Chapter 10 . Extending the Organization Supply Chain Management

Basics of Supply Chain

• The supply chain has three main links :
  i) materials flow from suppliers and their "upstream" suppliers at all level.
  ii) Transformation of materials into semifinished and finished products through the organization's own production process.
  iii) Distribution of products to customers and their "downstream" customers at all level.
• Organizations must embrace technologies that can effectively manage supply chain.

• Plan - A company must have a plan for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for products or services.
• Source - Companies must carefully choose reliable suppliers that will deliver goods and services required for making products.
• Make - This is the step where companies manufacture their products or services. This can include scheduling the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging, and preparing for delivery.
• Deliver (logistic) - Companies must be able to receive orders from customers fulfill the orders via a network of warehouses, pick transportation companies to deliver the products, and implement a billing and invoicing system to facilitate payments.
• Return - This is typically the most problematic step in the supply chain. Companies must create a network for receiving defective and excess products and support customers who have problems with delivered products.

Information Technology's Role in the Supply Chain

Factors driving SCM :

i) visibility

ii) consumer behavior
iii) competition

iv) speed

Visibility

• Visibility - more visible models of different ways to do things in the supply chain have emerged. High visibility in the supply chain is changing industries, as Wal-mart demonstrated
• Supply chain visibility - the ability to view all areas up and down the supply chain
• Bullwhip effect - occurs when distorted product demand information passes from one entity to the next throughout the supply chain.
• Supply chain visibility allows organizations to eliminate the bullwhip effect

Consumer behavior

• Companies can respond faster and more effectively to consumer demand demands through supply chain enhances.
• Once an organization understands customer demand and its effect on the supply chain it can begin to estimate the impact that its supply chain will have on its customers and ultimately the organizations performance
• Demand planning software - generates demand forecasts using statistical tools and forecasting techniques

Competition

• Supply chain planning (SCP) software - uses advanced mathematical algorithms to improve the flow and efficiency of the supply chain
• Supply chain execution (SCE) software - automates the different steps and stages of the supply chain
• SCP and SCE both increase a company's ability to compete
• SCP depends entirely on information for its accuracy
• SCE can be as simple as electronically routing orders from a manufacturer to a supplier
• SCP and SCE in the supply chain :

Speed

• Three factors fostering speed :
  i) Pleasing customers has become something of a corporate obsession.
  ii) Information is crucial to managers' abilities to reduce inventory and human resources requirements to a competitive level.
  iii) Information flows are essential to strategic planning for and deployment of resources.

Supply Chain Management Success Factors

• SCM industry best practices include :
  i) Make the sale to suppliers
  ii) Wean employees off traditional business practices
  iii) Ensure the SCM system supports the organizational goals
  iv) Deploy in incremental phases and measure and communicate success
  v) Be future oriented

SCM success stories

• Top reasons why more and more executives are turning to SCM to manage their extended enterprises

• Numerous decision support systems (DSSs) are being built to assist decision makers in the design and operation of integrated supply chains
• DSSs allow managers to examine performance and relationships over the supply chain and among :
  - Suppliers
  - Manufacturers
  - Distributors
  - Other factors that optimize supply chain performance

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Chapter 9 . Enabling the Organization Decision Making

Bismillahirahmanirrahim...

Decision Making

• Reasons for the growth of decision-making information systems :
  - People need to analyze large amounts of information
  - People must make decision quickly
  - People must apply sophisticated analysis techniques such as modelling and forecasting, to make good decisions.
  - People must protect the corporate asset of organizational information
• Model - a simplified representation or abstraction of reality
• IT systems in an enterprise

Transaction Processing Systems

• Moving up through the organization pyramid users move from requiring transaction information to analytical information.

• Transaction processing system - the basic business system that serves the organizational level (analysts) in an organization.
• Online transaction processing (OLTP) - the capturing of transaction and event information using technology to :
  i) process the information according to defined business rules
  ii) store the information
  iii) update existing information to reflect the new information
• Online analytical processing (OLAP) - the manipulation of information to create business intelligence in support of strategic decision making

Decision Support Systems

• Models information to support managers and business professionals during the decision making process.
• Three quantitative models used by DSSs include :
  i) Sensitivity analysis - the study of the impact that changes in one (or more) parts of the model have on other parts of the model.
  e.g : What will happen to the supply chain if a hurricane in South Carolina reduces holding inventory from 30% to 10% ?
  ii) What-if analysis - checks the impact of a change in an assumption on the proposed solution.
  e.g : Repeatedly changing revenue in small increments to determine it effects on other variables.
  iii) Goal-seeking analysis - finds the inputs necessary to achieve a goal such as a desired level of output.
  e.g : Determine how many customers must purchase a new product to increase gross profits to $5 million.

Executive Information Systems

• A specialized DSS that supports senior level executives within the organization
• Most EISs offering the following capabilities :
  - Consolidation - involves the aggregation of information and features simple roll-up to complex groupings of interrelated information.
  e.g : Data for different sales representatives can be rolled up to an office level. Then state level, then a regional sales level.
  - Drill-down - enablers users to get details, and details of details of information.
  e.g : From regional sales data then drill-down to each sales representative at each office.
  - Slice-and-dice - looks at information from different perspectives.
  e.g : one slice of information could display all product sales during a given promotion, another slice could display a single product's sales for all promotions.
• Digital Dashboard - integrates information from multiple components and presents it in a unified display.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Intelligent system - various commercial applications of artificial intelligence
• Artificial Intelligence - simulates human intelligence such as the ability to reason and learn
  - Advantage : can check info on competitor
• The ultimate goal of AI is the ability to build a system that can mimic human intelligence

• 
  
• Four most common categories of AI include :
  - Expert system - computerized advisory programs that imitate the reasoning processes of experts in solving difficult problems
  e.g : playing chess
  - Neural network - attempts to emulate the way the human brain works.
  e.g : Finance industry uses neural network to review loan applications and create patterns or profiles of applications that fall into two categories which is approved or denied
  Fuzzy logic - a mathematical method of handling imprecise or subjective information.
  e.g : Washing machines that determine by themselves how much water to use or how long to wash.
  - Genetic algorithm - an artificial intelligent system that mimics the evolutionary, survival-of-the-fittest process to generate increasingly better solutions to a problem.
  e.g : Business executives use genetic algorithm to help them decide which combination of projects a firm should invest.
  - Intelligent agent - special-purposed knowledge-based information system that accomplishes specific tasks on behalf of its users
  * multi-agent systems
  * Agent-based modelling
  e.g : Shopping bot - Software that will search several retailer's websites and provide a comparison of each retailer's offering including prive and availability.

Data Mining

• Data mining software includes many forms of AI such as neural networks and expert systems

• Common forms of data-mining analysis capabilities include :
  - Cluster analysis
  - Association detection
  - Statistical analysis

Cluster analysis - a technique used to divide an information set into mutually exclusive groups such that the members of each group are as close together as possible to one another and the different groups are as far as possible

• e.g : Consumer goods by content, brand loyalty or similarly

Association detection - reveals the degree to which variables are related and the nature and frequency of these relationships in the information

• Market basket analysis - analyzes such items as Web sites and checkout scanner information to detect customers' buying behavior and predict future behavior by identifying affinities among customers' choices of products and services
• e.g : Maytag uses association detection to ensure that each generation of appliances is better than the previous generation.

Statistical analysis - performs such functions as information correlations, distributions, calculations, and variance analysis

• Forecast - predictions made on the basis of time-series information
• Time-series information - time-stamped information collected at a particular frequency
• e.g : Kraft uses statistical analysis to assure consistent flavor, color, aroma, texture and appearance for all of its lines of foods.

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Chapter 8 . Accessing Organizational Information - Data Warehouse

History of Data Warehouse

• Data warehouse extend the transformation of data into information.
• In the 1990's, executives become less concerned with the day to day business operations and more concerned with overall business functions.
• The data warehouse provided the ability to support decision making without disrupting the day-to-day operations.

Data Warehouse Fundamental

• Data warehouse - a logical collection of information - gathered from many different operational databases - that support business analysis activities and decision-making tasks.
• The primary purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository for decision-making purposes.
• Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) - a process that extracts information from internal and external databases, transforms the information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into data warehouse.
• Data mart - contains a subset of data warehouse information.

Multidimensional Analysis and Data Mining

• Databases contains information in a series of two-dimensional.
• In a data warehouse and data mart, information is multidimensional, it contains layers of column and rows
• Dimension - a particular attribute of information.
• Cube - common term for the representation of multidimensional information.

• Data mining - the process of analyzing data to extract information mot offered by the raw data alone.
• Data mining tool - uses a variety of techniques to find patterns and relationships in large volumes of information and infers rules that predict future behavior and guide decision making.

Information Cleansing or Scrubbing

• An organization must maintain high quality data in the data warehouse.
• Information cleansing or scrubbing - a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete information.
• contact information in an operational system

• Standardizing customer name from operational systems

• Information cleansing activities

• Accurate and complete information

Business Intelligence

• Business intelligence - information that people use to support their decision-making efforts
• Principle BI enablers include :
  - Technology
  - People
  - Culture
• Technology - BI software can do sophisticated analyses today that were unavailable to the largest organizations a generation ago.
• People - BI allows organizations to systematically create insight and turn these insights into actions.
• Culture - BI attitude flourishes in an organization depends in large part on the organization's culture.

T H E  E N D

Chapter 7 . Storing Organizational Information - Database

Relational Database Fundamentals

• Information is stored in database

- Database - maintains information about various types of objects (inventory), events (transactions), people (employees), and place (warehouse).

• Database models :

Hierarchical database model - information is organized into a tree-like structure (using parent-child relationships) in such a way that it cannot have too many relationships

Network database model - a flexible way of representing objects and their relationships

Relational database model - stores information in the form of logically related two-dimensional tables

Entities and Attributes

Entity - a person, place, thing, transaction or event about which information is stored

• the rows in each table contain the entities

Attributes (fields, columns) - characteristics or properties of an entity class

• the columns in each table contain the attributes 

Keys and Relationships

- Primary keys and foreign keys identify the various entity classes (tables) in  the database

Primary key - a field (or group of fields) that uniquely identifies a given entity in a table

Foreign key - a primary key of one table that appears an attribute in another table and acts to provide a logical relationship among the two tables

Relational Database Advantages

1. Increased flexibility

• a well-designed database should :
  - handle changes quickly and easily
  - provide users with different views
  - have only one physical view
  Physical view - deals with the physical storage of information on a storage of information on a storage device
  - have multiple logical views
  Logical view - focuses on how users logically access information
  - e.g : a mail-order buss-2 people view diff format (logical views) but same physical view

2. Increased scalability and performance

• a database must scale to meet increased demand, while maintaining acceptable performance levels
  Scalability - refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands
  Performance - measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction

3. Reduced information redundancy

• Databases reduce information redundancy
  Redundancy - the duplication of information or storing the same information in multiple places
• Inconsistency is one of the primary problems with redundant information - difficult to decide which is most current and most accurate

4. Increased information integrity (quality)

• Information integrity - measures the quality of information
• Integrity constraint - rules that help ensure the quality of information
  -Relational integrity constraint - rule that enforces basic and fundamental information - based constraints
  - e.g : users cannot create an order for a nonexistent customer : an order cannot be shipped without an address
  Business-critical integrity constraint - rule that enforce business rules vital to an organization's success and often require more insight and knowledge than relational integrity constraints
  - e.g : Product returns are not accepted for fresh product 15 days after purchased : A discount maximum of 20 percent

5.Increased information security

• Information is an organizational asset and must be protected
• Databases offer several security features :
  - Password - provides authentication of the user
  - Access level - determines who has access to the different types of information
  - Access control - determines types of user access, such as read-only access

Database Management Systems (DBMS)

• software through which users and application programs interact with a database

Data-Driven Web Sites

• an interactive Web site kept constantly updated and relevant to the needs of its customers through the use of a database

Data-driven Web site business advantages :

• Development - allows the web sites owner to make changes any time - all without having a rely on a developer or knowing HTML programming.
• Content management - a static web site requires a programmer to make updates. This adds is an unnecessary layer between the business and its web content, which can lead to misunderstanding and slow turnarounds for desired changes
• Future expandability -having a data-driven web site enables the site to grow faster than would be possible with a static site. Changing the layout, displays, and functionally of the site (adding more features and sections) is easier with a data-driven solution.
• Minimizing human error - A well-designed, data-driven web site will have "error trapping" mechanisms to ensure that required information is filled out correctly and that content is entered and displayed in its correct format.
• Cutting production and update costs - A data-driven web site can be updated and "published" by any competent data entry or administrative person. In addition to being convenient and more affordable, changes and updates will take a fraction of the that they would with a static site.
• More efficient - With a data-driven solution, the system keeps track of the templates, so users do not have to.
• Improved stability - with a data-driven website, there is peace of mind, knowing the content is never lost - even if your programmer is.

Data-Driven Business Intelligence

Integrating Information among Multiple Databases

• Integration - allows separate systems to communicate directly with each other
  - Forward integration - takes information entered into a given systems and sends it automatically to all downstream systems and processes
  - Backward integration - takes information entered into a given system and sends it automatically to all upstream systems and processes

• without integration, an organization will :
  - spend considerable time entering the same into in multiple system
  - suffer from the low quality and inconsistency typically embedded in redundant info.