BLOG naku!

SAD 1 - (Assignment 4)

2010-05-06T00:54:00.000-07:00

SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT MODELS

We all have done on knowing how the System Analyst works in developing a certain task or project. This time, we are going to explore what are the aids or tools in developing a system. In developing a system, there are common system development process models that are used to guide the analysis, design, development, and maintenance of information systems. There are many different methods and techniques used to direct the life cycle of a software development project. Most techniques and methods have similarity in goals and share common task while each is designed for a specific purpose or reason. This topic will explore the similarities and differences among these various models and will also discuss how different approaches are chosen and combined to address practical situations.

The Waterfall Model

This model is said to be the earliest method of structured system development in a traditional approach. The simplest possible process model and therefore, the least likely to be correct. The waterfall model is widely used despite of being too inflexible and linear when it comes to meeting its customer’s needs. It models the software development process as a stately and chronological through the previously mentioned phases. As we can see in this model, Waterfall development has distinctive goals for each phase of development where each phase is completed for the next one is started and there is no turning back. Though it is orderly, simple to understand, and represents a process that is easy to manage and measure, the problem is that not even the simplest systems actually get built that way. But of course, in such methods and techniques, there’s always an advantage on it despite of the negative. And the seeming advantage of the waterfall process is that it allows for departmentalization and managerial control. It is because there is a schedule that is typically set with deadlines for each stage of development and a product can proceed through the development process. In theory, this process leads to the project being delivered on time because each phase has been planned in detail.

Each phases…

Requirements Gathering and Analysis – this is the phase where all possible system requirements to be developed are identified. System requirements are those set of functional and non-functional that the end-user expects from the system. There are tools in gathering requirements, either consultation, interviews, surveys, etc. The goal of this phase is to determine how these requirements will be accommodated in the system. There should be broad communication between the customer and the developer. Finally, a Requirement Specification document is created which serves the purpose of guideline for the next phase of the model.

Software & System Design – once all the requirements have been collected and analyzed, this time is to identify on how the system will be constructed to carry out their task. It is very important to understand what we are creating and what it should look like. The system has to be properly designed before any implementation is started. This phase is focused on the data requirements, software construction and the system interfacing. This phase also will defined the hardware and software needed. The aim of this phase is to generate a System Architecture document that serves as an input for the software design phase of the development, but also as an input for hardware design or selection activities.

Implementation – the software and system design is now translated into machine readable computer codes. Once the system design documents are done, the work is said to be divided in modules/units and coding is started. Different high level programming languages like C, C++, Pascal, Java are used for coding. Each modules/units will be integrated after the coding phase will be done. There is now a unit testing to test the system functionality and verify if the modules/units meet the specifications.

Testing – In this phase the system is tested. More often than not programs are written separately by modules/units. The separate modules are brought together and tested as a complete system to check if all modules/units coordinate between each other. There is a test to ensure that interfaces between modules work, the system works on the intended platform, and that the system does what the user requires. After successfully testing the software, it is delivered to the customer.

Maintenance – this phase is said to be never ending because it is believed that problems of the system developed will arise after its practical use starts, therefore, the problems in the system will be solved after its deployment. Software will definitely undergo change once it is delivered to the customer. And since not all the time, these problems will come directly at a time; it needs to be solved whenever it will arise. And this process is so-called maintenance.

The Spiral Model

The Spiral Model is inspired by the Waterfall Model and Prototyping Models. This model is simply designed to include best features that the two models has, and of course to enhance and introduce new features that can be used to design a good system. The term spiral is used to describe the process that is followed as the development of the system takes place. Like the Prototyping Model, primary version of the system is developed, and then repeatedly customized based on input received from customer evaluations. However, unlike the Prototyping Model, the development of each version of the system is carefully designed using the steps involved in the Waterfall Model. That is why this model is said to be a combination of both Prototyping and Waterfall.

Like a spiral, the process begins at the center position in this model. It moves clockwise. And each movement of the spiral usually results in a deliverable. Though it is not clearly defined what this deliverable is, there is changes as it traverse along the development of the system. Like for example, the first traversals may result in a requirement specification. The second will result in a prototype, and the next one will result in another prototype or sample of a product, until the last traversal leads to a product which is now ready to be sold. Thus the related activities and their documentation will also establish towards the outer traversals. And since there is iteration around the spiral, increasingly more complete versions of the system are built.

Similar to the waterfall model, the spiral model has chronological cycles/stages, with each stage having to be completed before moving on to next. Primary, the difference between the waterfall model and the spiral model is that the project system development cycle moves towards eventual completion in both the models but in the spiral model the cycles go back several times over to earlier stages in a repetitive sequence.

The Rapid Application Development

Above models are helpful and successful, in response to rigid, cascading, one-way steps of Waterfall Models of development, Spiral Model is introduced. Through this model, there is a way of reducing risk. But in order to ensure high responsiveness, projects are designed with fixed timescales. Sometimes leads to sacrificing functionality if necessary. This allows the development team to focus on the pieces of functionality that have the highest business value, and deliver that functionality rapidly. That is where the Rapid Application Development or RAD takes part. The RAD methodology was developed to respond to the need to deliver systems very fast. This method has a task list and a work breakdown structure that is designed for speed. However the major difference in RAD is a set of management techniques that are optimized for speed.

Change is often the reason for delays in application development. In long development processes, changes in functionality requirements or project scope after a lot of time has cause many months to be lost and significant expense to be incurred for redesigning and redevelopment. RAD minimizes scope and requirements creep by limiting the project's exposure to change and shortening the development cycle and limiting the cost of change by incorporating it up-front before large investments are made in development and testing.

However, the RAD approach is not appropriate to all projects. Say large real-time projects on RAD would not instill much confidence. The success of a RAD approach is determined on its project scope, size and circumstances.

The structure of the RAD lifecycle as we noticed is designed to ensure that developers build the systems that the users really need. This lifecycle includes all of the activities and tasks required to scope and define business requirements and design, develop, and implement the application system that supports those requirements. Below are the four stages that RAD has:

Requirements Planning – this stage is also known as the Concept Definition Stage where defines the business functions and data subject areas that the system will support and determines the system’s scope. Like the other models, it has to list all the requirements needed for the system in order to design appropriate concepts. It consists of a review of the areas associated with the proposed system. This review produces a broad definition of the system requirements in terms of the functions the system will support.

User Design – this stage is also known as the Functional Design Stage where uses workshops to model the system’s data and processes and to build a working prototype of critical system components. It consists of a detailed analysis of the business activities related to the proposed system. Following the analysis, the design of the system is outlined. System procedures are designed, and preliminary layouts of screens are developed. The requirements being gather is now being used for designing user’s views and designing the system itself.

Construction – this stage is also known as the Development Stage where completes the construction of the physical application system, builds the conversion system, and develops user aids and implementation work plans. There is now a small team of developers, working directly with users, finalizes the design and builds the system. The construction process consists of a series of design-and-build steps in which the users have the opportunity to modify the requirements and review the resulting software implementation. Construction includes documentation and instructions necessary to operate the new application, and routines and procedures needed to put the system into operation.

Implementation – this is the last stage of the system development and is also known as the Deployment Stage, this stage includes final user testing and training, converting data, and the implementation of the application system. It also involves managing the change from the old system environment to the new one. This may include implementing bridges between existing and new systems. User acceptance is the end point of the implementation stage.

Images Sources:

For waterfall model: Image @ http://www.buzzle.com/showImage.asp?image=1449
For Spiral Model: Image @http://www.instructionaldesign.org/models/spiral_model.html
For RAD: Image @ http://www.casemaker.com/download/products/totem/rad_wp.pdf

SAD 1 - (Assignment 3)

2010-05-06T00:49:00.000-07:00

We are done to explore the world of the information system analyst. We already know what their key roles, their traits, characteristics are and we know how these characteristics/traits are very important to be a good System Analyst. We also touched our personal traits/characteristics to justify if we can be good system analysts. We identify some of our strengths so that we can examine ourselves if we are qualified to be a good System Analyst. Having the idea on how we can see our strengths to call ourselves as System Analyst, we easily pin-point different characteristics/traits that can be used in the near future as we, our very own selves will have to join the world of the information system analyst. And to validate those characters/traits that we are able to identify for ourselves, we are tasked to look for a System Analyst on practice and do an interview on what would be the skills and characteristics must a system analyst develop in order to be more effective in any design modeling process. This time, what we have learned during the sharing and presentation was validated as we throw some follow-up questions that will help us to understand more on what a System Analysts really does, I mean his skills to possess and you know characteristics.

Aside from asking his skills and characteristics, we also tackle the role of a system analyst as a project manager since this time, we’ll going to identify the role of system analyst as a project manager.

The interviewee stressed out that the role of a System Analyst is really different from a Project Manager. But there’s an exemption, because sometimes or most of the time a System Analyst is at the same time the Project Manager in doing a project.
While we are done to identify the roles/traits/characteristics/skills of a System Analyst, below are the roles of the Project Manager based on our conducted interview.
The Project Manager is the one who do the talking. According to the interviewee, the Project Manager is the one who will talk to the client at the start of doing the project. He is the one to explain it to the client on what are the team agreements in doing the project. In short, at the start of getting a project, Project Manager will be the representative of the team in doing oral or written agreements.

The Project Manager is the one who get the overall specifications/scope of the project. According to the interviewee, Project Manager is responsible for gathering information on the scope and specks of the project. As a Project Manager he is responsible to gather information and specifications from the client and of course from the users.

The Project Manager is the one to identify the people who will be involved in the project. It means that as a Project Manager, he/she is the one to create his own team for the development of the entire project. He/she will be the one to choose the people that he wanted to get involved in doing the project.

The Project Manager is the one to “always give the updates”. According to the interviewee, it is the Project Manager’s responsibility to always give updates on what are the progresses of the projects and it’s not the client who will get updates and follow-ups on what is happening on the current project development. The interviewee also states his opinion on the difference of Pinoy clients and US clients. He said that Pinoy clients doesn’t bring too much pressure it is because our nature is not too on getting updates with regards to the progress of the project and usually any delays are welcome for some extension dates. Say we are given a deadline on April 30, 2010, most Pinoy clients will meet the team on the deadline, and we can never hear those getting updates prior to the deadline while US clients are very strict on the time and deadlines. The interviewee shared his experiences on his US clients where he has to give updates on the project thrice a day. And it should be what you accomplished yesterday, what you are doing today and what you will be doing tomorrow.

The point here is that the Project Manager is the one to impose that a deadline is a deadline and tell the client before the deadline if the project will be extended so that the other party will not expect anything on the date of supposed completion.

The Project Manager is the one to delegate task to the team members. He is the one to set timeline to clients and to his team.

How do you describe yourself as a project manager in your information system department or organization (in general)? The interviewee answered that “once we set a certain goal, there should be completion “.

Can you site related experiences of being a project manager of a team in a certain project? How do you go along with it? The interviewee cites his experience during every general assembly of SAMULCO where he is responsible for the registration process. He did his job on it successfully in three years now. He is the in-charge of the secretariat (hardware, people, etc.). He is the one who oversee the entire event. And he said that in every project “you can learn, And I’m happy this year”.

What do you think are your strengths and weaknesses as a project manager? Strength: “I know what I want and I get what I want”. Weakness: “I do most of a time to think as a programmer”.

Evidence (photo):

SAD 1 - (Assignment 2)

2010-05-06T00:45:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1 explores the world of the information System Analysts. And as we go deeper on the discussions, we are able to know what are the roles that a System Analyst does, what are their expected skills, characteristics, traits and qualifications. And thus, we are able to identify important traits and characteristics that we will be having considering ourselves as a System Analyst. Assignment 1 is all about what we have learned based on the discussions that we had on Chapter 1 and identifying some characteristics that we might have to possess as a good System Analyst.

Now in this Assignment 2, we are tasked to interview a System Analyst. It only means that we are going to venture on the outside experiences. After assessing our own selves as a System Analyst, we are going to get outside and look for another System Analyst. Luckily, we find Mr. James of SAMULCO.

Below is based on the two-hour interview with the SAMULCO’s MIS Department Head.

Question: What are the skills and characteristics must a System Analyst develop in order to be more effective in any design modeling process?

The interviewee answers the following skills:

1. Observant/keen to details. The interviewee believes that it is very important for an Analyst that he/she is a keen observer to avoid risk such a waste of time, resources and money. He site an example where there are system requirements that was left unnoticed at the start of the development and later found out that the missed requirements are needed in the system. There is now a need for repetition and therefore a waste of time, resources and of course money. So see how important to be a keen observer specially in identifying details on the system requirements needed.

2. Develop basic programming skills. The interviewee believes that a System Analysts must have basic programming skills. Well a System Analyst is not really expected to be an expert in programming but at least knowledgeable. It is because he/she is working with the developer and of course they should understand each other. Basically, System Analyst should get along with the developer that is why he/she needs to understand what do the developer means if they were talking about programming terms. There is also a technical knowledge so that it would be easy for both of the client and the analyst to assemble information requirements and to communicate when it comes to what the programmers is needed.

The interviewee also stressed out that the System Analyst must see the problem instead of solutions. Because in most cases, analysts see the solution first and forget what is really the problem. It is not good in a way that the analyst will sometimes imagine more being a programmer rather than being an analyst. He/she sees how the project will be look like and how it will going to functions and overlook on what do really the system needs to do. He said that a good analyst must see the problem alone to come up into a good solution.

3. System Analyst must be a global thinker. According to the interviewee, a good analyst is a global thinker. It is because he/she looks at the over-all system of the project. He’s making an example of the two men working on the empty lot, digging soil…while another man happens to stop by and asked what they were doing. The first man answered that they were digging the soil and the second man answered that they were going to build a house. See? The first man is the developer; he only sees the current situation, on what he’s currently working, very literal. While the second man is the system analyst, he sees the entire system and not only what is currently going on. The developer is very systematic while the analyst is a global thinker.

4. Communicate well both with the Project Manager and developer. Communication is very critical for a System Analyst because it is the only way to get along with the Project Manager, developer as well as the clients and users. It is important in dealing with your clients while you are going to review the necessary information that the desired system needs. The analyst must be a good communicator in both oral and written and one thing not to forget must be a good listener. He/she can listen and may able to react what might people have to say, in a careful and nice way. The interviewee believes that communication among the Project Manager and developer is very important because it is the only way to discuss what will be the project and how will it being develop. He said that good communication is very useful since in doing a project where the analyst will going to identify the requirements, it is the responsibility of the System Analyst to discuss the requirements needed for the project instead that the client will be the one to discuss what is needed. At first, I find it confusing since what I have understand is that it is the client who knows what they want the system would do but the interviewee adds that it is because the analyst is the one who knows more on what will be the project is going to be like and how it functions. Some add-ons might be given by the client after examining the list of functionalities that the analyst identified.

Question: Which specific skill/character do you need to develop most? The interviewee said that he has to develop more on being a global thinker.

Question: When and how can you apply these skills/traits/characters in relation to your job specification (in the organization/company)? Everyday, No not really everyday but when the opportunity calls he said. He also said that he will be talking to the HR, they will identify problems that need to be addressed and that’s the time that he will be talking to his buddy.

Evidence (photo):

SAD 1 - (Assignment 1)

2010-04-26T20:27:00.001-07:00

Based on your learnings of chapter 1, identify and discuss some charateristics you have as a good Systems Analyst.

Chapter 1 is all about “The World of the Information System Analysts”. This topic tries to explore the possibilities of a System Analyst. As an IT student, there are many possible jobs in the near future that wait. One of them is being a System Analyst, a business professional who uses analysis and design techniques to solve business problems using information technology. He/she is the person who views the analysis of problems as a challenge and who enjoys devising workable solutions.

As what I have understood on the discussions, a System Analysts can be of different role like as problem solvers that usually solve business problems using information technology, as consultants, as agent for change and as supporting expert. He/she plays many roles and sometimes balancing several at the same time. Therefore, an analyst must possess various skills to effectively carry out this job. System Analysts must have broad knowledge and variety of skills, including technical, business, and people skills. It is because a Systems analyst works on strategic plans and then system development projects so it should be an obligation that analysts must know what are those in the technical, business and the people. Technical knowledge is important in project planning, system analysis, system design, database design and even network design, implementation and systems support. The people knowledge will help the analysts to understand the people that he/she will get along with. He/she needs to understand how the people will think, learn, react to change and communicate to make the tandem easier and avoid conflicts. Interpersonal skills deal with relationships and the interface of the analyst with people in business that is why it can be very crucial because it evoke commitment from the client.

From the sharing and discussions, I was able to identify important traits and character that a System Analysts must posses to be able to meet respective goals and objectives. Below are some of most important traits, qualities and characters that I have to develop to be a good system analyst.

I must be a good communicator and have a strong personality to convey people. A System Analysts must be able to communicate both in oral and written. It is important in dealing with your clients while you are going to review the necessary information that the desired system needs. Also I have learned that an analyst must not only a good communicator but also a good listener and must be able to react what might people have to say. I must be capable of relating meaningfully to other people over extended periods of time. There should be a mutual understanding between the analyst and his/her client. It is very important in building trust and cooperation during the entire development and implementation process. The analyst must easily get along with people that he/she had to work in for.

I must be knowledgeable of the technology trends. The analyst is not necessarily have to posses’ extreme programming skills and not expected to know the intricacies of programming, but a decent general knowledge of concepts and terms is essential especially in dealing with the systems design. There should be also a technical knowledge so that it is easy for the analysts to deal with technicalities to glean information requirements from users and to communicate what is needed for programmers.

I must be knowledgeable of business functions. Though it is not expected that the analysts is an expert in business but a decent understanding of the client's world is required especially that the analyst will going to review business related issues. He/she is expected to review the business function performed by the organization during the information gathering.

I should be familiar with the concepts for the appropriate design of the particular development environment. It is not just doing the project because it is what the client wants. The analyst must know the appropriate design concepts. He/she must have the ability to conceptualize and think creatively. Also, the analysts should have the skills to use the tools to facilitate his/her work like using design software tools.

I must be flexible to adapt changes and twists during the development of the project and must be able to alter unexpected situations. It is very important for an analyst to have a strong heart to face whatever problems that the project will encounter during development. The systems analyst must be a self-disciplined, self motivated individual who is able to manage and coordinate innumerable project resources, including other people. There should be an effective time management and personal organization skills. A good analyst must be able to identify and suggest requirements that are more useful than what are the clients has been able to identify. Most importantly, analysts must have high standard of ethics and integrity in all dealings. It is very important especially that analysts will be given the chance to get involve in private information.

Finally, to be a good system analyst is to live with integrity. It is very much important to gain trust from expected clients and to build cooperation and camaraderie. For me it is better to enjoy the whole development process and make it easier for both parties. Though some organizations would like to build gap among outsiders, a good analyst must know how to break the gap. That is why it is also important to share and exchange ideas to better things. The aforementioned are just some of the important characteristic that a good system analyst must have. Otherwise, there is no good dealing between clients.

MIS 2(Assignment 8)

2010-02-04T21:14:00.000-08:00

In building a Corporate Strategy, there should be processes that need to be done to come up in much more strategic planning. There should be a gathering of information from the industry, checking the capabilities of the company and also the consideration of reaching the desired objectives in a much broader way. It is also important to analyze the gap between the current state and the future desired state of the company and of course the systems. While I tried to look for the most critical parameters to be considered in developing a strategic IS planning, I find the best areas to get more focused during analyzing. These are plan, people, operation and implementation and technology.

Here are the questions I tried to develop out of those areas in making a Strategic Planning:

1. What are the issues outside your organization? And how it affects your organization?

Explanation: Before getting on what is inside, let’s try to look on what is outside the organization. Having an environmental scan can help us analyze on the issues that we are going to address.

2. Is your organization ready for Strategic Planning?

Explanation: This question will assess the level of readiness of the organization to conduct a strategic planning while there are number of issues that must be addressed. This will determine whether the top management down to the lowest level is willing to participate and committed to do the effort until the results will be known. In order to have an organized process, readiness should be determined by answering these issues below:

a. Specific issues must be identified/ choices that the planning process should address
b. Organizational profile should be developed
c. There should be a creation of Planning committee
d. Individual roles should be clarified (like who does what during the process)
e. Information that must be collected to help make sound decisions must be identified

3. What business is in your company?

Explanation: In developing a strategic planning, it is very much important to define the business clearly. There should be a clear definition of the business in terms of their responsibility in their customers, on what they really do in their customers or in their company. Try to see the things that the company needs to reduce, stop or avoid based on the current state of the organization.

4. What are the basic Plans of the company?

Explanation: It is important to realize that a basic plan is basically required in line with the budget and the organization’s strategic objectives. The said plan should summarize the details of a coordinated approach within the organization to reaching the envisioned state. It is like setting a goal and objectives for the organization and asking the question “What do you want to achieve?” and “What are your specific, measurable targets?”

5. What are the Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats inside your organization?

Explanation: After wide look on external issues, let’s take a hard look on the internal issues. Having the S.W.O.T analysis will help you find and create much more strategic plans.

6. Assuming that things will be the same they are today, what business will be in?

Explanation: It is important to look at the possibility of changes. Will you like to continue the line of business that you have now or you would like to change it? Based on the performance that your organization had during the past years, is it an intelligent decision to pursue on the same strategy or it is better to change the way it used to be.

7. What are the capabilities of the IT department?

Explanation: This is the people issues where it represents the readiness of the organization to absorb and use technology and the awareness factors. Knowing the organizations capability in this area will help to develop a much more strategic planning and effective results.

8. What is the status of your customers or the industry itself?

Explanation: The success of the operation and implementation will define the capability of the organization to handle projects in information technology. This will evaluate the readiness of the organization on implementing complex IT projects and then how will they managed it afterwards. Therefore, status can help in adjusting strategic planning.

9. What are their technologies?

Explanation: This will help in the study of their existing technology platforms, the infrastructure, the state and format of the data and information present. Along with this is the governance of their technology. Many technologies present in the company will sometimes result to difficulties management. There should be clear and specific choice in the standards, responsibility and approval structure in selecting and implementing technology to avoid difficulty of integration.

References:

http://www.allianceonline.org/content/index.php?pid=172
http://managementhelp.org/fp_progs/sp_mod/str_plan.htm

MIS 2(Assignement 7)

2010-01-26T23:07:00.000-08:00

In tradition people have needs, wants, and fun of nice-to-haves. In our needs we will pay its marketable value. Our wants, we will pay modestly for, especially if were bundled with needs. Nice-to-haves we will not pay for it at all, but we’ll take them. The market economy is focused on needs, since they are the corporation's bread and butter, the only source of reliable revenue and growth, and hence profit.

Now there’s Google. In the progress and fast growth of technology, Google, in the other way around, fulfill people’s needs, wants, and nice-to-haves, and that’s all for free. At this point, we were divided into the leading side of they so called ‘digital divide’ who gratefully take all those three and never mind to differentiate them unless some of the nice-to-haves unduly complicate the application, in which case we don't want them and those on the other side of the ‘digital divide’ who get none of those three. The market understands none of this behavior, since it doesn't conform to any accepted business model. Google doesn't really seem to care either. They're too busy doing what they do so well - delighting customers with valuable, perceptive, boldly innovative and expansive new products, on a scale that is the envy of every entrepreneur.

GOOGLE, Inc.

Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. The Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009, the company has 20,164 full-time employees. Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, implying a value for the entire corporation of US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google. The company has been identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine's #1 Best Place to Work, and as the most powerful brand in the world (according to the Millward Brown Group). Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The unofficial company slogan, coined by former employee and Gmail's first engineer Paul Buchheit, is "Don't be evil". Criticism of Google includes concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, and censorship.

GOOGLE's REVOLUTIONARY BUSINESS MODEL

Google's Infrastructure:

The business concept of Google is similar to the concept and strategy where Dell has started, only adapting it for the Web & broadband. Instead of trucks and assembly plants, however, Google’s supply chain is made up of fiber networks, data centers, switches, servers and storage devices. Google has to deliver search as fast as possible at as low a cost as possible.

To simply understand its business model, here is the breakdown of its data inputs: Relevancy of results. Speed of search. Cost of executing a search query.

The company has to make sure that the speed of its search is really, really fast. Any random search on Google these days takes between 0.12 to 0.06 seconds or faster. It also makes perfect sense for Google to build their own servers, storage systems, Internet switches and perhaps, sometime in the future, even optical transport systems. Let’ s try to imagine connecting thousands of hosts (storage and server systems) at speeds of, say, 10 gigabits per second, in a manner that allows any-to-any connections. The sheer cost to keep such a beast going would suck up a major component of the infrastructure. A better option is to have gear that is customized for your processes, ones in which you have a major operational expenditure advantage. In the telecom bubble, large service providers were brought to their knees by operational expenditures. With the exception of optical systems, Google has built or is building the gear. It has been rumored to be a big buyer of dark fiber to connect its data centers. Building customized gear is an expensive strategy, but when you are the scale of Google, it starts to become less of an issue. Its because process-optimized infrastructure ensures that Google’s cost of executing a query keep going down.

In summary, Google’s gigantic infrastructure is the big barrier to entry for its rivals, and will remain so, as long as the company keeps spending billions on it. That said, there’s another thing Google could learn from Dell: Maintain the quality of your search results — customers will only put up with shoddiness for so long(Om Malik | Dec. 4, 2007).

Google's Direct Competitors :

1. Yahoo! Inc.
2. Pvt1 (MSN) – Privately held
3. AOL, Inc.
4. Industry (Internet Information Provider)
5. Disney Online
6. Move, Inc.
7. Match.com,LLC
8. Sina Corp.
9. Daum Communications Corp.
10. Joost (Joost is the new online distributor of Viacom’s property)
11. Etc.

Google's Unique Advantage:

The fact can't be denied. Google have achieved a massive success and almost every developer wants to work for. Google is best known for search and for ads associated with search, that was obvious. This is in essence Google’s one true product. It is the one feature Google developed for the outside world. When Google developed search it was no different from a small company. It is what Google has done since then that makes Google different. Google doesn’t answer to any external power. They don’t have anyone they have to deliver a product to. There is no contract with a deadline. Due to not having any external dependencies, Google can continuously iterate over a product until it reaches a state of near perfection. It can stay in internal testing as long as Google wants and no one is going to care. See Gmail, Google Maps, etc. This then allows Google to use the perfect form of the agile process. Continuous iterations and testing and development, continues improvement. Then as Google sees fit, release the products. As they get better and better, more people use them and more money from ads come in. And that's undeniably beautiful! Another thing is that Google hit on the formula for ads before anyone else. They now have such a commanding lead in that arena that to compete with them you need deep pockets of money of your own. That makes it difficult to launch a company and follow Google’s lead of avoiding external dependencies and having the near perfect product development process. Google does have external contracts, especially for serving up ads on other sites. But notice that Google’s contracts are different from most companies’ contracts. Google isn’t developing a product for these companies. All they are doing is giving them an existing product that Google has already completed and released. Development on that product might still be happening, but it happens within Google, not within the realms of the contract. Google is still free to develop how ever they want (Mark Mzyk | March 17, 2008). And i agree to this point that Google has its unique advantage.

Google's New Services:

1. New Storage Service

Google Inc has announced its very own cloud-based online storage service which will allow Google Docs users to upload any type of file of up to 250 MB while they will have access to a total storage capacity of 1GB.
(14 January, 2010, by Desire Athow)

2. Google Nexus One

Yesterday Google wasn’t in the business of selling mobile phones. Today, they are. The Nexus One smartphone has arrived and on sale at Google.com/phone.
(January 5th 2010 by Michael Arrington)

3. Google Click-to-Call (Billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices

Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.”
(Jan 5, 2010 at 7:59am ET by Greg Sterling)

4. Google Goggles

A new service that promises to make searching the internet as easy as taking a photo. The application, which will premier on Android devices, will let a user snap a photo of anything and then Google will deliver search results based on that image.
(December 7th, 2009 by Stefan Constantinescu)

5. Free DNS Service

Google just released their newest service which is public DNS. DNS is one of the most important services when it comes to using the internet. The main reason to use the service is reliability, speed and increased security. Google has put in other measures to help with overall security.
(December 5th 2009 by serverguy)

Sources/References:

http://searchengineland.com/google-to-introduce-click-to-call-billing-in-ads-on-mobile-devices-32831
http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/03/17/googles-unique-advantage/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/05/google-nexus-one-the-techcrunch-review/
http://www.serverninjas.com/free-dns-service-offered-by-google
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/co?s=GOOG
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/10/16.html
http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/1/14/microsoft-teases-google-over-new-storage-service/

MIS 2 (Assignment 1)

2009-12-12T09:22:00.001-08:00

"The difference between a successful person and others is
not a lack of strength,
not a lack of knowledge,
but rather a lack of will."
- Anonymous

Granted that I will be a worthy IT professional, ten years from now I will run my own IT Firm that showcase the skills of many IT professionals and we’ll gonna be partners in making large projects for the country and across the nation. Hoooh!!!!!! Wow, very rewarding! “Worthy IT professional”. The term can really paid off the years I’m going to spend in this college.

I was caught in a thought if why is it that there is this word “worthy”. I came to ask myself in silence, why such a “worthy” IT professional? Does it mean that some IT professionals are not worthy to be called IT professionals? Well, I just tried to examine the unnecessary question that pop up my mind.

As we try to see the reality, yes, there are many IT professionals that are not “worthy”. Simply because they never met the standard of this word, of being worthy to be called IT professionals. But why is it that there is a need to categorize those people? What makes a difference? The word “worthy” will sometimes taken for granted. Sometimes we believed that we are worthy because we did it! We believed that we are worthy because people around us believed we are. We believed that we are worthy because we surpass others, we are greater that others. But we never realized that being “worthy” to something means a lot of everything. The very life of a worthy, successful man is sober and dramatic.

When I was a child and people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always had an answer. That answer changed significantly as time went on, that’s the reality I guess, but one thing never did — I always had a plan. May it change or will it stay, planning for our future is very important. One way in which we plan for the future is by setting goals. When you try to look its definition in the dictionary or when browsing through the internet, you will find a lot of definitions of what is a goal. But I like this one from Merriam-Webster Online that defines a goal as “the end toward which effort is directed”, very brief but concise.

What are my strategies to see myself what I wanted ten years from now?

Planning

Many of us people want to experience a much more enriched life than the one that is currently unfulfilling. We are not contented of what we have. We always want to go higher. That is why we don't have to continue with what we have if we really desire to change or alter it. Don't be stuck in doing the same old things which get you the same old things over and over again. It’s redundant and time-consuming.

One way in which we plan for the future is by setting goals. We actually set goals regularly when we plan what we want to accomplish that day, that week, or even that month. Those are usually fairly simple goals, like we clean the house, finish an assignment, do laundry, cooking and etc. We decide what we want to do and then figure out what we need to do to achieve our goal. Then we get into more complicated goals -- our plans for the future.

The career action plan describes steps that we will take to reach our goals. In this case the goal is usually a particular career objective. It can be a particular occupation, a rung on the career ladder, or an earnings level. It's fairly simple to say that in five years we want to be a such and such. Or in two years we want to earn amount of money. It's achieving those goals that aren’t so easy. Of course the actions we take to try to accomplish our goals will play a huge role in whether we reach them. But, the way we formulate our goals is extremely important too. We need to have a criteria inline to achieve our goals.

One question that is often asked, "Can setting a goal make you a success, can it make you a winner, an achiever?" Well, our experience shows that it will help focus you on areas in both your personal and professional life that are important and meaningful, rather than being guided by what other people want you to be, do, or accomplish. Goal setting has made a tremendous difference in my life. They have allowed me to achieve success, and to accomplish what I had previously only dreamed of, or wished for. And, for me, I consider being successful when I reach the objective I set. My goals kept me on track and, in some cases, they gave me hope. They allowed me to see not where I was today, but where I could be in the future. And, yes I faced challenges and obstacles, but I persevered, found ways around these challenges. I was determined. And when you are determined and when you stay focused it is amazing what you achieve.In can order to attain some of my goals meant learning and developing new skills. More importantly, this process has helped me to focus not on what someone else thought I should do or be, but instead, on what I wanted to accomplish with my life.

A goal can be set and achieved in all areas of your life. Goals are not just to be dedicated to work related thoughts or endeavor’s; goals are key to accomplish a new skill, enjoy the finer aspects of a new hobby, the attainment of education in whatever field is of interest, or in renovating a house. The old adage holds true everyday in that if you don't know where you are going any destination will do. By setting a clear and precise goal or objective, you know where you are headed, and in knowing that, you will be more able to avoid going off in the wrong direction, or taking inappropriate action, or expending wasted energy. No matter what success you are looking for, you will always have issues to overcome, but if you have a strong desire you will find a way. Setting a goal in your life can help you achieve all that you dream of. Take your dreams and turn them into a goal, push through the obstacles, persist, and achieve what you are dreaming of.
But, just setting a goal without knowing how to overcome procrastination won't work. Neither will goals without knowing and learning how to achieve goals. Moving on with life means that you have chosen to close a door behind you in order to open a new door in front of you. Byron Pulsifer

Recipe for Success

A phrase for a recipe for success goes like this:
"Goals turned into action plans with time frames can bring you success."

Recipe for Success:

- Add what you want ( your goal)
- Measure correctly (be specific with your goal, make sure it is measurable)
- Mix in an action plan ( how you are going to get it)
- Combine time frames (when will each action plan be complete)

Put the ingredients in step by step. Keep stirring until you can see results - translated - do a little bit every day.

Don't be discouraged if it doesn't cook through first time around - translated - we sometimes hit obstacles and roadblocks, find a way around them.

Once completed take time to celebrate each action step.

Enjoy, your goal is achieved. Set another.

Now to get into the mixture in the success elements of goal setting.

Important distinction between a goal and an action plan. Simply put, a “goal” tells you

WHAT you want ;
and,
an “action plan” tells you
HOW you are going to get it.

To quote Bette Davis, "Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless."

Goals will help you to use your time both efficiently and effectively. People without goals usually accomplish much less than they are capable of achieving. Its not saying that they have no accomplishments. However, if they had set goals, they could have accomplished a lot more. They could have attained what they currently have with fewer detours, false starts, misdirected motion, wasted resources, and a lot faster.

Goals Need Action

Without a goal setting strategy, or series of actions, that you are going to use to work towards the goal, whether or not you achieve the goal you have set is just a matter of blind chance. And blind chance is no way to run a successful business! To be successful, you need to make things happen, not just let things happen.

Goal + Action = Success

Other people suggest you should categorize goals for all areas of your life: for example, career, family, financial, leisure, educational. You then set goals for each category. I would caution you in using this method initially because it may result in setting so many goals that you find yourself becoming overwhelmed. Other people suggest picturing how you want your life to look in 10 years, and then set your goals accordingly. This method can work as long as you break the long term goals into a series of smaller ones.

While all of these suggestions have merit, you must be careful not to set goals that are too numerous, or too complex, so that you become overwhelmed, and end up accomplishing none of them. Like anything else you learn to do, start by keeping it straight forward and simple. As you learn by achieving actual results, you can expand the number of goals, the complexity, the time frames, and your horizons.

The best way I have found to determine my goals is to ask myself a couple of very simple questions. The first and most obvious question is, “what do I want?".

Sources/Reference:

http://www.goal4success.com/goal-now/index.html
http://www.goal4success.com/
http://www.mindtools.com/page6.html
http://careerplanning.about.com/od/settinggoals/a/goal_setting.htm
http://www.goal4success.com/success-elements/index.html

MIS 2 (Assignment 5)

2009-12-12T09:21:00.003-08:00

“Begin at the beginning in organizational change”

In business, the only constant is change. Systems change, partnerships change, markets change, the business world is in a constant state of flux. Unfortunately, enterprise software applications are by their nature rigid, complex and often inaccessible to untrained users or external audiences. As such, users adapt by managing business processes with homegrown databases, spreadsheets and email. Visibility, cycle time and decision making suffer.

What is Organizational Change?

Typically, the concept of organizational change is in regard to organization-wide change, as opposed to smaller changes such as adding a new person, modifying a program, etc. Examples of organization-wide change might include a change in mission, restructuring operations (e.g., restructuring to self-managed teams, layoffs, etc.), new technologies, mergers, major collaborations, "rightsizing", new programs such as Total Quality Management, re-engineering, etc. Some experts refer to organizational transformation. Often this term designates a fundamental and radical reorientation in the way the organization operates.

What provokes Organizational Change?

Change should not be done for the sake of change -- it's a strategy to accomplish some overall goal. (See Organizational Performance Management.) Usually organizational change is provoked by some major outside driving force, e.g., substantial cuts in funding, address major new markets/clients, need for dramatic increases in productivity/services, etc. Typically, organizations must undertake organization-wide change to evolve to a different level in their life cycle, e.g., going from a highly reactive, entrepreneurial organization to more stable and planned development. Transition to a new chief executive can provoke organization-wide change when his or her new and unique personality pervades the entire organization.

Range of Organizational Change

1. AUTOMATION: Using technology to perform current tasks more efficiently & effectively

2. RATIONALIZATION OF PROCEDURES: Streamline Standard Operating Procedures; eliminate bottlenecks

3. BUSINESS REENGINEERING: Radical redesign of processes to improve cost, quality, service; maximize benefits of technology

4. PARADIGM SHIFT

PARADIGM: A complete mental model of how a complex system functions

A Paradigm Shift Involves:

– Rethinking the Nature of the Business,
– Overhaul of the Organization;
– A Complete Reconception of How The System Should Function

Business Re-engineering

"Business Process Reengineering, although a close relative, seeks radical rather than merely continuous improvement. It escalates the efforts of JIT and TQM to make process orientation a strategic tool and a core competence of the organization. BPR concentrates on core business processes, and uses the specific techniques within the JIT and TQM ”toolboxes” as enablers, while broadening the process vision."

Paradigm Shift

A major change in the way of thinking about something or doing something. For example, development of the Internet has resulted in a paradigm shift in the way people gather information.

The Most Radical Type of Change is… Paradigm Shift;

The term "paradigm shift" has found uses in other contexts, representing the notion of a major change in a certain thought-pattern — a radical change in personal beliefs, complex systems or organizations, replacing the former way of thinking or organizing with a radically different way of thinking or organizing:

• Margaret Mead, noted anthropologist, shows a flashlight to the indigenous New Guinea people.
• People blind since birth are suddenly enabled to see.
• Development of new techniques in genetics impact long-standing assumptions in anthropology.
• An apparently miraculous healing is witnessed by someone who has never believed in miracles.
• Brainwashing — conversion experiences, patterned or forced shifts in ideology and social behavior.

Examples of paradigm shifts in complex systems and organizations:

• The English monarchy with the signing of the Magna Carta.
• The "explosion of life" during the Pre-Cambrian era.
• Society with the invention of any of several innovations (fire, the wheel, gunpowder, the microchip, etc.).
• Warfare and corporate structure with the development of the Prussian military model.

I don’t really know how to explain this further by my own interpretation of some articles that I have read. That is why I choose to paste some write ups that I found when browsing the internet. I know it could help to understand the real paradigm situation that I’m trying to discuss here.

Journal Article Excerpt
Coping with consumer fraud: the need for a paradigm shift.
by Monroe Friedman

For years law enforcement and consumer education practitioners have developed speaker programs, user guides, and other informational initiatives to help consumers avoid economic exploitation by criminal elements. (For recent examples, see Mott 1993; Schulte 1994; Shadel and John T. 1994; Whitlock 1994.) While these practitioner-launched undertakings are undoubtedly valuable to many consumers, it is the contention of this paper that they would be even more valuable if the advice they offered drew upon a larger and more diverse informational base.

In this paper an informational base commonly associated with consumer initiatives for avoiding victimization is described along with its limitations. Also described and illustrated with a detailed case study is a plan for enlarging the informational base to provide more useful behavioral guidelines for helping consumers avoid victimization.

CURRENT INFORMATIONAL BASE AND ITS LIMITATIONS

The informational initiatives noted above, like most consumer guides for avoiding victimization by criminals, are often authored by practitioners with considerable professional experience dealing with criminal cases of consumer fraud. This experience typically takes the form of criminal investigations or prosecutions at federal, state, or local levels. The natural unit of description and analysis is often the individual police or agency report which describes in detail the particulars of an alleged act of fraud and its impact on the victim (e.g., financial losses incurred).

While such reports offer several advantages to the practitioner who hopes to help consumers avoid victimization (e.g., the reports provide a wealth of swindle particulars useful in informational and educational programs), the cases they consider are unlikely to be representative of seams at large. Many crimes go unreported. This is especially true of confidence swindles (Alston 1986). The victims who fail to report these crimes are often found to be naive individuals who do not know they have been swindled, and if they do, they do not know to whom to turn once a swindle has occurred (Blum 1972). For these various reasons, among others, available case studies may offer an unrepresentative picture of the population of actual confidence swindles.

A second weakness of case studies concerns their lack of information about critical incidents or stimuli that lead to consumer victimization (Fattah and Sacco 1989). It may be helpful to get an impression, albeit unrepresentative, of when and where swindles occur, but this general information is unlikely to be sufficient to help consumers ward off a swindle's sophisticated approach. It is not enough to provide a set of general background characteristics to be on guard against as this leads to many "false positives" being identified by consumers in that many individuals or circumstances that fit the swindle category also fit the non-swindle category.

What is especially needed to resolve such dilemmas is what behavioral theorists refer to as discriminative stimuli and responses, stimuli and responses whose presence is associated with a swindle situation and whose absence is associated with a non-swindle situation (Donahoe and Palmer 1994). In lay terms we should think of discriminative stimuli as danger signals and discriminative responses as escape mechanisms.

Unfortunately, analyses of case studies of swindles reveal few danger signals and escape mechanisms. This finding should come as no surprise because case studies typically found in police files have been placed there as a result of the failure of swindle victims to recognize and act upon discriminative stimuli.

HELPING OLDER AMERICANS COPE WITH CONFIDENCE SWINDLES: A PILOT STUDY

To secure needed information on danger signals and escape mechanisms, it was decided that a new strategic approach was needed, one that focused on the coping behaviors of consumers who have been successful in dealing with the attempts of confidence swindlers to defraud them. As older Americans are often victimized by confidence swindles (Friedman 1992), it was also decided to focus on this population subgroup. The first step in implementing the new strategic approach consisted of placing public service announcements (PSAs) in various news media and newsletters regularly received by older Americans in an effort to identify such success stories. A primary source was the AARP Bulletin, the newsletter of the American Association of Retired Persons, which is distributed each month to the more than 30 million AARP members, all of whom are at least 50 years of age. These older Americans were asked by the PSAs to submit a short letter relating a personal story of a suspected confidence swindle directed at them that they managed to avoid; they were also asked to identify relevant ...

Here is another piece that tackle Paradigm Shift

The entire nation on some level knew what they were doing; they just never noticed what it was doing to them, or in the case of the sub-prime mortgage lenders and investors -- never cared. The United States is now riding on what appears to be an unstoppable conveyor belt towards losing its top ranking within the global hierarchy. With such a massive tipping point, often comes a new way of thinking.

Economic Tipping Point Leads to Consumer Paradigm Shift

According to Edmund L. Andrews and Jackie Calmes in the December 17, 2008 New York Times article, “Fed Cuts Rates to A Record Low,” the Federal Reserve cut federal-fund rates to zero in a desperate effort to revive frozen credit markets and to stimulate bank lending and consumer spending.

Some economists feel however, that despite the fact that money is now “on sale,” making it easier to pay credit card debt and afford equity loans; lowering interest rates might not be the golden ticket to boost consumer confidence. Americans are too worried about losing their jobs to assume more debt, while banks are unwilling to lend to people they view as a high credit risk. People are too scared to borrow what they might not be able to pay back and banks are reining in loose lending standards, two changes in fiscal behavior that in hindsight, seem long overdue.
This involuntary shift to how consumers and institutions view and manage money flow could move this once-or-twice in a century economic crisis into the next critical phase of social change: a complete paradigm shift. The nation might be ready to adopt an entirely new belief system about how to ensure the health of an economy. Consumers, lenders, bankers, investment firms and leaders will likely have to permanently alter how they now operate liquidity levels and money systems.

http://tim.oreilly.com/articles/paradigmshift_0504.html - This site offers an article which has the title of “Open Source Paradigm Shift” by Tim O'Reilly dated June 2004. He said that “This article is based on a talk that I first gave at Warburg-Pincus' annual technology conference in May of 2003. Since then, I have delivered versions of the talk more than twenty times, at locations ranging from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the UK Unix User's Group, Microsoft Research in the UK, IBM Hursley, British Telecom, Red Hat's internal "all-hands" meeting, and BEA's eWorld conference. I finally wrote it down as an article for an upcoming book on open source," Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software," edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. R. Lakhani and to be published by MIT Press in 2005”. See for more details…

Leaders in Organizations are in a position to change the evolution of humanity. For example, in changing our perception from wrong-mindedness to right-mindedness---moving from a fear-based to love-based perception---the scarcity principle of there's not enough and I'm afraid I won't get mine no longer governs. This movement can facilitate a change from the having mode to the being mode...not wanting more and consuming only what I need, thus sustainability by acting responsible. This transformation in perception no longer requires the endless search for outside material contentment which gives us an illusion of success for the intrinsic elements of happiness, security, satisfaction, purpose, and fulfillment are found within.

John P. Kotter's 8 steps to successful change:

John Kotter's highly regarded books 'Leading Change' (1995) and the follow-up 'The Heart Of Change' (2002) describe a helpful model for understanding and managing change. Each stage acknowledges a key principle identified by Kotter relating to people's response and approach to change, in which people see, feel and then change (see a more detailed interpretation of the personal change process in John Fisher's model of the process of personal change): Kotter's eight step change model can be summarised as:

1. Increase urgency - inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant.

2. Build the guiding team - get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.

3. Get the vision right - get the team to establish a simple vision and strategy, focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.

4. Communicate for buy-in - Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials, simply, and to appeal and respond to people's needs. De-clutter communications - make technology work for you rather than against.

5. Empower action - Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders - reward and recognise progress and achievements.

6. Create short-term wins - Set aims that are easy to achieve - in bite-size chunks. Manageable numbers of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones.

7. Don't let up - Foster and encourage determination and persistence - ongoing change - encourage ongoing progress reporting - highlight achieved and future milestones.

8. Make change stick - Reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, new change leaders. Weave change into culture.

Sources/References:

http://managementhelp.org/mgmnt/orgchnge.htm#anchor493930
http://www.nexprise.com/solutions/business_process_automation.html
http://www.businessballs.com/changemanagement.htm
http://www.yourdictionary.com/business/paradigm-shift
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5001350002
http://neohumanism.org/p/pa/paradigm_shift.html
http://americanaffairs.suite101.com/article.cfm/economic_tipping_point_leads_to_paradigm_shift

MIS 2 (Assignment 6)

2009-12-12T09:21:00.001-08:00

Things that really matters for success : CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

It’s often difficult to see the “wood for the trees” in business because many important matters compete for your attention. Likely to said, it can be extremely difficult to get everyone in the team pulling in the same direction and focusing on the true essentials. That's where Critical Success Factors can help. These are the essential areas of activity that must be performed well if you are to achieve the mission, objectives or goals for your business or project. By identifying your Critical Success Factors, you can create a common point of reference to help you direct and measure the success of your business or project. As a common point of reference, it will help everyone in the team to know exactly what's most important. And this helps people perform their own work in the right context and so pull together towards the same overall aims.

As we try to browse the internet and many other resources, we can find and will discover that there are potential but confusing variety of definitions and uses of Critical Success Factors.

Definitions

Critical Success Factor

An element of organizational activity which is central to its future success. Critical success factors may change over time, and may include items such as product quality, employee attitudes, manufacturing flexibility, and brand awareness. This can enable analysis.

Critical Success Factor

Any of the aspects of a business that are identified as vital for successful targets to be reached and maintained. Critical success factors are normally identified in such areas as production processes, employee and organization skills, functions, techniques, and technologies. The identification and strengthening of such factors may be similar.

Critical Success Factor

Is a business term for an element which is necessary for an organization or project to achieve its mission. For example, a CSF for a successful Information Technology (IT) project is user involvement.

In the Re.ViCa project a critical success factor is defined as follow:

A critical success factor is a factor whose presence is necessary for an organization to fulfill its mission - in other words, if it is not present then its absence will cause organizational and/or mission failure.

Those are just some of various definitions that we could find when we will try to look for the critical success factors.

History/Background

The idea of identifying critical success factors as a basis for determining the information needs of managers was proposed by Daniel (1961) but popularized by Rockart (1979). The idea is very simple: in any organization certain factors will be critical to the success of that organization, in the sense that, if objectives associated with the factors are not achieved, the organization will fail - perhaps catastrophically so. Rockart (1979: 85), by referring to Daniel (1961), gives the following as an example of the CSFs: new product development, good distribution, and effective advertising for the food processing industry - factors that remain relevant today for many firms.

As we start to discuss the Critical Success Factors, it is important to realize that the specific factors relevant for you will vary from business to business and industry to industry. The key to using Critical Success Factors effectively is to ensure that your definition of a factor of your organizations activity which is central to its future will always apply.

Therefore success in determining the Critical Success Factors for your organization is to determine what is central to its future and achievement of that future.

What is a Critical Success Factor?

Critical Success Factors are the critical factors or activities required for ensuring the success your business. The term was initially used in the world of data analysis, and business analysis.

Critical Success Factors have been used significantly to present or identify a few key factors that organizations should focus on to be successful.

As a definition, critical success factors refer to "the limited number of areas in which satisfactory results will ensure successful competitive performance for the individual, department, or organization”.

Inevitably, the CSF concept has evolved, and you may have seen it implemented in different ways.

Critical Success Factors are strongly related to the mission and strategic goals of your business or project. Whereas the mission and goals focus on the aims and what is to be achieved, Critical Success Factors focus on the most important areas and get to the very heart of both what is to be achieved and how you will achieve it.

The term “Critical Success Factor” is used differently, due to ambiguity of the word “critical”. But whichever definition we may use, just be sure it is understood by all the managers.

Types of Critical Success Factor

Four Basic Types:

1. Industry - resulting from specific industry characteristics;
2. Strategy - resulting from the chosen competitive strategy of the business;
3. Environmental - resulting from economic or technological changes; and
4. Temporal - resulting from internal organizational needs and changes.

It is said that things that are measured get done more often than things that are not measured. Each CSF should be measurable and associated with a target goal. It’s not necessarily that you need exact measures to manage. Primary measures that should be listed include critical success levels or, in cases where specific measurements are more difficult, general goals should be specified.

Identifying Critical Success Factors is important as it allows firms to focus their efforts on building their capabilities to meet the CSF's, or even allow firms to decide if they have the capability to build the requirements necessary to meet Critical Success Factors.

Using the Tool: Summary Steps

In reality, it is said that identifying a CSFs is a very iterative process. The mission, strategic goals and CSFs are intrinsically linked and each will be refined as it is developed.

Below are the Summary Steps that used iteratively that will help us identify the CSFs for the business or project:

Step One: Establish your business's or project's mission and strategic goals.

This is the mission statements and the vision statements. Vision Statements and Mission Statements are the inspiring words chosen by successful leaders to clearly and concisely convey the direction of the organization. By crafting a clear mission statement and vision statement, you can powerfully communicate your intentions and motivate your team or organization to realize an attractive and inspiring common vision of the future.

Step Two: For each strategic goal, ask yourself "what area of business or project activity is essential to achieve this goal?" The answers to the question are your candidate CSFs.

Tip: How Many CSFs?

To make sure you consider all types of possible CSFs, you can use Rockart's CSF types as a checklist.

1. Industry - these factors result from specific industry characteristics. These are the things that the organization must do to remain competitive.

2.Environmental - these factors result from macro-environmental influences on an organization. Things like the business climate, the economy, competitors, and technological advancements are included in this category.

3. Strategic - these factors result from the specific competitive strategy chosen by the organization. The way in which the company chooses to position themselves, market themselves, whether they are high volume low cost or low volume high cost producers, etc.

4. Temporal - these factors result from the organization's internal forces. Specific barriers, challenges, directions, and influences will determine these CSFs.

Step Three: Evaluate the list of candidate CSFs to find the absolute essential elements for achieving success - these are your Criticial Success Factors.

As you identify and evaluate candidate CSFs, you may uncover some new strategic objectives or more detailed objectives. So you may need to define your mission, objectives and CSFs iteratively.

Step Four: Identify how you will monitor and measure each of the CSFs.

Step Five: Communicate your CSFs along with the other important elements of your business or project's strategy.

Step Six: Keep monitoring and reevaluating your CSFs to ensure you keep moving towards your aims. Indeed, whilst CSFs are sometimes less tangible than measurable goals, it is useful to identify as specifically as possible how you can measure or monitor each one.

Examples of Critical Success factors

Statistical research into CSF’s on organizations has shown there to be seven key areas. These CSF's are:

1. Training and education
2. Quality data and reporting
3. Management commitment, customer satisfaction
4. Staff Orientation
5. Role of the quality department
6. Communication to improve quality, and
7. Continuous improvement

These were identified when Total Quality was at its peak, so as you can see have a bias towards quality matters. You may or may not feel that these are right or indeed critical for your organization.

The Critical Success Factors we have identified and use in the BIR process are captured in the mnemonic PRIMO-F

1. People - availability, skills and attitude
2. Resources - People, equipment, etc
3. Innovation - ideas and development
4. Marketing - supplier relation, customer satisfaction, etc
5. Operations - continuous improvement, quality,
6. Finance- cash flow, available investment etc

Key Points

Critical Success Factors are the areas of your business or project that are absolutely essential to its success. By identifying and communicating these CSFs, you can help ensure your business or a project is well-focused and avoids wasting effort and resources on less important areas. By making CSFs explicit, and communicating them with everyone involved, you can help keep the business and project on track towards common aims and goals

References/ Sources:

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_80.htm
http://rapidbi.com/created/criticalsuccessfactors.html#WhatareCSFs
http://informationr.net/ir/6-3/paper108.html
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_90.htm

MIS 2 (Assignment 3)

2009-12-12T09:20:00.001-08:00

“God has never promised a road of success without crossing the streets of failure, only a safe arrival”

Life is full of frustrations. From the minor irritations of losing something to the major problem of continued failure towards a desired goal. Since many of the things we truly want require a degree of frustration, being able to manage frustration is required in order to allow us to remain happy and positive even in trying circumstances.

This entry required us to interview an IS professional of what are the two most frequent experiences that caused their frustrations. Thus we visited the AMS Group of Companies located at F. Torres St., Davao City. It was Mr. Gemrald R. Glibara, the M.I.S Department Head of AMS Group of Companies who entertained us.

They said that experiences are the best way of learning. And most of us agree to the statement. True, what we experienced will help us direct our undertakings. But sometimes, our experience will lead us to frustrations. Anyway, let me put here a definition of frustrations from a site: http://www.psychologistanywhereanytime.com/

Frustration is an emotion that occurs in situations where a person is blocked from reaching a desired outcome. In general, whenever we reach one of our goals, we feel pleased and whenever we are prevented from reaching our goals, we may succumb to frustration and feel irritable, annoyed and angry. Typically, the more important the goal, the greater the frustration and resultant anger or loss of confidence.

Frustration is not necessarily bad since it can be a useful indicator of the problems in a person's life and, as a result, it can act as a motivator to change. However, when it results in anger, irritability, stress, resentment, depression, or a spiral downward where we have a feeling of resignation or giving up, frustration can be destructive.

In the case of the interviewee, the two most frequently experienced causes of frustrations while working on an IS Plan is the lack of support/resistance to changes and communication gap. But primarily, the dissatisfaction and contrast in time plan to the time completion (Lederer and Sethi) and lack of support time concerns so as the communication and user’s fulfillment and acceptance.

Resistant to changes/Lack of Support

The interviewee plays a multi-role in their company. Aside from being the Head in his office, he is working as the Developer and Project Manager of the MIS department. He is working on the automation of manual systems of the HR Department of the company and developing the enterprise systems for the company. He said that in any organization, it should be practical to note that we cannot expect that everything in the work will go smoothly like in adapting to changes which is one of the frustrations of an IT professional. Since technology will evolve every now and then, changes will always take place and many cannot go along to adapt these changes especially that the users themselves will resist the changes. It is a fact that we cannot please everyone.

But there are reasons that some/many individuals resist to adapt changes, may it be technological or organizational change.

Nature and Causes to Resistant to Change

The list of reasons why individuals might be resistance to especially to organizational change has grown. However, there are several that are quite common and prevalent, which help provide a solid basis to understanding the concept. Most probably, employees may resist change because of something new they wanted to learn and acquire. De Jag er (2001) argues that “Most people are reluctant to leave the familiar behind. We are all suspicious about the unfamiliar; we are naturally concerned about how we will get from the old to the new, especially if it involves learning something new and risking failure” (p. 24).

Furthermore, Folger and Skarlicki (1995) investigated resistance to change as a response to the treatment employees receive in the change process. Specifically, they focus on the resentment-based resistance-reactions by disgruntled employees regarding the perceived unfairness of the change. They claim that “resent-based resistance behaviors, which can range from subtle acts of non-cooperation to industrial sabotage, are often seen by the perpetrators as subjectively justifiable-a way to “get even” for perceived mistreatment and a way for employees to exercise their power to restore perceived injustice” (p. 36).

There is a Positive Resistance

Most of the time, managers often perceive resistance negatively and employees who resist are viewed as disobedient and obstacles the organization must overcome in order to achieve the new goals. However in certain instances, employee resistance may play a positive and useful role in organizational change. Insightful and well-intended debate, criticism, or disagreement do not necessarily equate to negative resistance, but rather may be intended to produce better understanding as well as additional options and solutions. de Jager (2001) claims, "the idea that anyone who questions the need for change has an attitude problem is simply wrong, not only because it discounts past achievements, but also because it makes us vulnerable to indiscriminate and ill-advised change' (p. 25).

Piderit (2000) points out that what some managers may perceive as disrespectful or unfounded resistance to change might be motivated by an individual's ethical principles or by their desire to protect what they feel is the best interests of the organization. Employee resistance may force management to rethink or reevaluate a proposed change initiative. It also can act as a as a gateway or filter, which can help organizations select from all possible changes the one that is most appropriate to the current situation. According to de Jager (2001), "resistance is simply a very effective, very powerful, very useful survival mechanism' ' (p. 26).

Folger & Skarlicki (1999) claim "that not all interventions are appropriate as implemented -the organization might be changing the wrong thing or doing it wrong. Just as conflict can sometimes be used constructively for change, legitimate resistance might bring about additional organizational change" (p. 37).

Another Reasons Why there is a resistant to changes especially in the employees:

1. Creatures of habit

The usual things we did seems more comfortable. And changing the way people will operate or think is asking them to move outside their comfort zone. "We've always done it this way, so why do we need to change?" becomes the rallying cry for people who have difficulty changing their routines. In some cases, employees may ignore or deny the change simply because it requires them to experience something beyond their normal method of operation.

2. Fear of personal impact

Viewing change from a personal standpoint, some employees may respond by asking how the change will benefit them directly. Will it make their job easier? Will they have to work harder? Will the change put their job security in jeopardy? Will the change force them to work with different people or learn a new job?

3. Fear of the unknown

Employees may resist change simply because it is something unfamiliar. Not knowing much about the specifics of the change, they may imagine a worst case scenario, which can be very scary. They let fear of the unknown become their rationale for not giving the change a chance. These employees may acknowledge that a problem exists and agree that a change might improve it. However, they worry that the proposed change might actually make things worse! Their fear causes them to place roadblocks in the movement toward change.

4. Fear that the new way may not be better
If things have been going well, some employees may resist change because they fear that the change will not result in improvement. Focusing only on their part of the operation, they fail to realize that change is needed in order for the organization to stay competitive. They may resist forward movement because they are satisfied with the way things are going. Their current status is quite sufficient, and they wish to maintain business as usual.

5. . Unwillingness to learn

Some employees, hesitant to try new routines, express an unwillingness to learn anything new. They may say, "I already know all that I need to know." Like resistant employees who have already made up their minds that the change won't be productive, employees reluctant to learn something new impede the organization's growth and adaptation to change. They also hinder their own personal growth and development.

6. Closed mind

Some employees seem to have the attitude, "Please don't confuse me with any facts or supporting documentation about this change--I've already made up my mind!" Employees with this attitude approach the change process with their minds firmly made up, muttering, "No way!" during discussions and explanations of the future.

7. Concern about support system

Employees operating within predictable routines know their support system will back them up during challenging times. Changing the organizational structures may shake their confidence in their support system. They may worry about working for a new supervisor, with new employees or on unfamiliar projects because they fear that if they try and fail, there will be no one there to support them.

8. Loss of control

Familiar routines help employees develop a sense of control over their work environment. They feel they know what works and what doesn't, and this makes them confident about their contribution to the organization. Being asked to change the way they operate may make employees feel powerless and confused.

9. No obvious need

Some employees may see a change only from the perspective of the impact it has on them and their particular jobs. Not seeing the big picture, they may fail to recognize the positive impact of the change on the organization as a whole. Thus they may find the change disruptive and totally unnecessary. Their attitude may be, "If things have been working well all this time, why do we need to change?" or, in other words, “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?”

10. Fear of failure

Fear maybe the root of resistance to change. During this period, some employees may feel the need to cling to the past because it was a more secure, predictable time. If what they did in the past worked well for them, they may resist changing their behavior out of fear that they will not achieve as much in the future.

These are all initial responses you may experience when you announce an organizational change to employees. Once you understand why some employees resist change and realize that their reactions are perfectly normal, you will be better able to change their attitudes and turn their resistance into cooperation.

Conclusion

Employee resistance to change is a complex issue facing management in the complex and ever-evolving organization of today. The process of change is ubiquitous, and employee resistance has been identified as a critically important contributor to the failure of many well-intend and well-conceived efforts to initiate change within the organization.

In many cases, vast amounts of resources are expended by organizations to adjust employees to a new way of achieving desired goals. The natural propensity for individuals to "defend the status quo" presents a set of challenges that management must overcome in order to bring about desired change. Management must also seriously take into account and consider the myriad of problems that may result if they are not responsive to issues of resistance in the workplace.

In order to facilitate a smooth transition fi7om the old to the new, organizations must be competent in effective change management. The process of change management consists of getting of those involved and affected to accept the introduced changes as well as manage any resistance to them.

This investigation stresses that change usually involves an individual's psyche, so there are no concrete textbook answers and solutions to the problem. Since each individual is different, their perceptions and reasons for resisting are also different. As a result, researchers and scholars can theorize on how to lessen or remove employee resistance to change, but in the final analysis the only way to do so effectively is to understand the unique circumstances within each individual that is causing their particular resistance.

Communication Gap

The fast and efficient exchange of information is undeniably a competitive advantage in business. And in a fluctuating economic environment, it’s paramount. Unfortunately, in the rush to adapt to market needs, many organizations sacrifice effective communication. As priorities shift, executives may impart only the immediate goals and fail to share the rationale and strategies behind them. They may be so focused on results; they neglect to praise and reward their staff. Most of all, managers may forget that communication is a two-way exchange – one part dialogue, one part listening.

What Is Communication?

Communication is defined as a process by which we assign and convey meaning in an attempt to create shared understanding. This process requires a vast repertoire of skills in intrapersonal and interpersonal processing, listening, observing, speaking, questioning, analyzing, and evaluating. Use of these processes is developmental and transfers to all areas of life: home, school, community, work, and beyond. It is through communication that collaboration and cooperation occur.

Communication is the exchange of thoughts or information, feelings, or gestures between two persons; one would act as the sender of the message while the other would be the receiver. In effect, communication happens both ways to achieve therapeutic communication. The key is to listen. Active listening is use in Transactional Analysis; it is when you truly comprehend the message of the sender, not just words but the meaning itself. When communication is then become ineffective? That is when we have communication gaps. What causes these gaps? Technically, it's due to cultural differences where in there's a diversity of language, ethnicity and race. However, the details in the channels of communication such as the sounds, physical actions or gestures, and the entire physical environment when the message was delivered could also be a barrier. A failure would mean that there is a breakdown in communication.

What Does Communication Gap?

Communication gap is a state that occurs when what is being said is not been communicated to the addressee properly and completely. There can be many causes of communication gap depending on where it exists. Actually Communication gap is the biggest hurdle in achieving the organizational goal and does not help at all in achievement of organizational goal. Communication gap in an organization means that the goals and objectives that are set by the top management are either not communicated to the employees of the organization at all levels or if communicated they are not been understood properly by the employees This can be because of improper communication channels, unrealistic goals, inappropriate language etc.

Workplace communication gap between line managers and employees is widening. The challenge is to ensure that their contributions aren't buried under unexpected differences.

The interviewee shares his experience regarding the communication gap between himself and the office he is working to automate transactions. It was during the time when they gathered the requirements, both the office specified the functionalities to cater on the system that the interviewee will developed, after all necessaries have been agreed and passed the documentations they came up to the development of the system. As he deployed the system, all specified functionalities were made and it is functional. As time goes by, there were functionalities that the office wanted to add which supposed to be addressed during the requirements gathering, in this case it is now difficult for the IS professional to do some revisions and debugging when the system was actually delivered already. He also said, he is not used to make some closure and agreements in every documentation when asked if he was able to do it, for the systems are just in-source, and he is the one making the system so every time that certain office will request some functionalities to be added in the system, it will be cater and its part of the maintenance. To him, making some agreements and closure is only applicable to those who engaged in business process outsourcing.

Powerful Ways to Solve Communication Problems at Work

Someone once said that "communication is the lifeblood of an organization" - and it truly is. An organization that is experiencing a breakdown in communication will not live for very long because many problems will crop up and eventually cause the organization to die a natural death.

If communication problems do exist in your organization, make a quick response to resolve it. The life of your organization is at stake.

12 possible signs that your organization is facing communication problems:

1) You find it hard to get some people to cooperate.
2) Some people are being left out of the communication
loop.
3) Replies to messages are being delayed or completely
ignored.
4) Groups in the organization are failing to reach their goals.
5) Mistakes are cropping up more and more often.
6) People are resorting more to criticism and placing the blame on other people.
7) Morale of teams is going down.
8) Productivity is dull or at zero level.
9) You receive many complaints.
10) Moments of conflict result in expressions of anger.
11) There is significant employee turnover.
12) Business is going to your competitors instead of
to you.

If you find that there are some or many (if not all) of these warning signs present in your organization, it is advisable for you to take steps to address such problems before they kill your organization.

How does one correct or resolve such problems?
There are different steps to take to counter the prevalence of communication problems in organizations.

1) First, listen to the people involved or who have caused the communication problem in the first place. Doing so allows you to uncover the depth, nature and roots of the communication problem for that particular group of people.
2) If the problems are quite vast and have deeply-rooted causes, you may want to secure the help of a neutral negotiator. This third party may be able to get inside the problem more thoroughly than an insider because when communication problems crop up, the group involved may choose to clam up or point fingers rather than admit to their role in creating the problem.

3) To maintain confidentiality, it is possible to use a
tool such as a survey. People who might be scared to tell the truth because of reprisals would then have another safer option compared to coming out of the crowd.

4) After you have uncovered the problem and its roots, you may choose to initiate group counseling or training. The point of this is to address the problem of the group, rather than focusing on just one person. Finger-pointing is avoided. The saying "united we stand, divided we fall" should become the motto of the group.

5) It is important for the leader to have great communication skills so that communication problems can be resolved. Communication skills are required to diagnose communication problems, and naturally, provide the necessary solutions. Leaders who lack adequate communication skills might benefit from more training in communication.

6) Do your research - perhaps the communication problem you are experiencing now has occurred before in the history of the organization. And perhaps someone knows the solution that could work now. So look inwards into the heart of the organization, ask around, and you may find the way to properly address your organization's communication problems.

Remember, if your organization is already suffering communication problems; don't wait for these symptoms to get worse. Good communication is necessary for an organization to function properly and stay viable amidst the influx of a multitude of challenges from the environment. Act immediately on communication problems and stem the bleeding of your organization.

Success depends on how well we communicate. There must be the anticipation to actively listen and the concentration to portray the idea intended.

Sources/References:
http://ivythesis.typepad.com/term_paper_topics/2009/04/communication-gap.html http://www.blurtit.com/q945114.html
http://www.k12.wa.us/curriculumInstruct/communications/default.aspx
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do?contentType=Article&contentId=874378 http://ezinearticles.com/?6-Powerful-Ways-to-Solve-Communication-Problems-at-Work&id=652778

MIS (Assignment 8)

2009-10-01T18:21:00.001-07:00

Outsourcing

Outsourcing refers to a company that contract another company to provide services that might otherwise be performed by in-house employees. Many large companies now outsource jobs such as call center services, e-mail services, and payroll. These jobs are handled by separate companies that specialize in each service, and are often located overseas.

Reasons and Advantage…

There are many reasons that companies outsource various jobs, but the most prominent advantage seems to be the fact that it often saves money. Many of the companies that provide outsourcing services are able to do the work for considerably less money, as they don't have to provide benefits to their workers and have fewer overhead expenses to worry about.

Outsourcing also allows companies to focus on other business issues while having the details taken care of by outside experts. This means that a large amount of resources and attention, which might fall on the shoulders of management professionals, can be used for more important, broader issues within the company. The specialized company that handles the outsourced work is often streamlined, and often has world-class capabilities and access to new technology that a company couldn't afford to buy on their own. Plus, if a company is looking to expand, outsourcing is a cost-effective way to start building foundations in other countries.

If you want your organization to stay ahead of competition, concentrate on core competencies and make use of the latest technologies, then outsourcing can help your organization achieve all this and more. In outsourcing, the advantages of outsourcing are more than the disadvantages of outsourcing. The pros of outsourcing have driven more organization to step into offshoring and experience the benefits that it has to offer.

Disadvantage…

There are some disadvantages to outsourcing as well. One of these is that outsourcing often eliminates direct communication between a company and its clients. This prevents a company from building solid relationships with their customers, and often leads to dissatisfaction on one or both sides. There is also the danger of not being able to control some aspects of the company, as outsourcing may lead to delayed communications and project implementation. Any sensitive information is more vulnerable, and a company may become very dependent upon it’s outsource providers, which could lead to problems should the outsource provider back out on their contract suddenly.

While outsourcing may prove highly beneficial for many companies, it also has many drawbacks. It is important that each individual company accurately assess their needs to determine if outsourcing is a viable option.

The disadvantages of offshoring give organizations an opportunity to think about what they are stepping into. However the disadvantages of outsourcing are less than the advantages of offshore outsourcing. When outsourcing, you might not experience any of these disadvantages of offshoring, if you find a reliable outsourcing partner. Before outsourcing take the interests of your customers and employees into consideration and then make an informed decision. If your organization is genuinely interested in outsourcing, let not the disadvantages of outsourcing stop you.

http://www.outsource2india.com/why_outsource/articles/advantages-disadvantages-outsourcing.asp

Does Outsourcing Really Save Money?

Outsourcing is the practice of relocating certain parts or all of business off the shores of the country in which the business is located. Many companies employ this practice as a cost-saving device, and it undoubtedly can save money. This issue however is greatly complicated by all of the factors involved, and it’s valuable to look at how locating most business to foreign shores may save and cost money at the same time.

First, not all outsourcing goes to countries that have lower costs. Some countries relocate plants, stores, and facilities in countries that have higher costs but may have tax advantages. Typically, the practice involves using countries where costs to employ people and to rent or own facilities to house employees is significantly lower, and there may also exist tax advantages for employing large numbers of people within that country.

In highly industrialized countries, costs of wages and of facilities can be high, and companies may pay a fraction of this price elsewhere, while still employing workers who are just as skilled. For companies looking to cut expenses, outsourcing can be a viable means of accomplishing this, while still allowing a company to pay for more expensive employees in the country in which it was established. Many businesses have a combination of local employees and outsourced employees, while others relocate most business to foreign shores.

There have been some negative reactions to companies that outsource all aspects of their business. For instance, many businesses chose to relocate customer help lines to foreign countries and then some found this practice was not working well. People being helped by these lines weren’t getting the kind of service they required to remain customers, and some companies have chosen to stop outsourcing help line and customer service work to better serve customers. The bottom line is that if customer dissatisfaction mitigates cheaper employee costs, then outsourcing doesn’t save money.

Another way to evaluate outsourcing is by the way it affects the local economies in the main countries in which a business operates and depends on sales of products or services. Eliminating jobs from a country impacts its economy and the buying power of consumers. While outsourcing might result in being able to offer products at lower prices, number of customers and consumer spending decreases when jobs are not available. This is a common criticism of the practice.

When companies begin to outsource so much that unemployment rises and the general economy falters, these companies may be unable to make money. In other words, they may create a situation where no consumers exist to buy their products, no matter how inexpensive they are. It’s ultimately argued that decline in consumer buying power can cost companies money, far more than they’d save by outsourcing.

What companies that outsource must weigh is not just the short-term savings but the potential long term costs and possibly benefits for both itself and the society at large.

The Benefits of Outsourcing

Do you want to maximize your revenue and minimize your expenses?
Do you want to get access to specialized skills and services?
Do you want to concentrate more on your core business?
Do you want to save on money, time and infrastructure?

1. Cost Advantage

Outsourcing to countries such as India can give you access to cost-effective services. The same services with the same level of quality are offered in India for a much lower cost! This cost-advantage has increased the number of services that are being offered to India. Services such as call center services, teleradiology, medical billing, etc can help you save up to 60% of your total costs when outsourced! Getting access to high-quality services at a cost-effective price is the biggest benefit that you can get while outsourcing. Outsource and reap the benefits of outsourcing.

2. Save Big!

One of the benefits of outsourcing is that you can save on every aspect of your business and increase your profits. When you outsource, you can save on time, effort, infrastructure and manpower. Since you don't have to invest in infrastructure, you can also save on making unnecessary fixed investments. Outsourcing removes the burden of changing or maintaining infrastructure. You can also save on capital expenditure. Outsourcing can also help you save on training costs, because you do not have to invest in manpower. These savings will help bring about an increase in your revenue. Your organization can also save on investing in expensive software and technologies.

3. Get access to specialized services

By outsourcing you can get expert and skilled services. This benefit of outsourcing has been the key reason why several outsourcers opt for outsourcing. The function that you outsource may not be your core competency but you can find an outsourcing partner who is specialized in that particular business process. Your outsourcing partner will be able to provide more proficient services. This is yet another benefit of outsourcing, because if you perform all your business processes in-house, you will not be able to provide specialized and skilled services. Outsourcing can give you this advantage.

4. Concentrate more on your core business

One of the benefits of outsourcing is that your organization will be free to concentrate on your core business. By outsourcing all your non-core functions, your employees can be put to better use and you will be able to see a huge growth in your core business.

5. . Benefit from time zone advantages

Outsourcing to countries such as India has a time zone advantage. Your night will be India's day. With this advantage, your outsourcing partner can complete critical work and send it to you the next day. Thus, your work is continued by your outsourcing partner even after your employees go home. This enables the work to be completed much faster and gives your business a competitive advantage. This is one of the benefits of offshore outsourcing.

http://www.outsource2india.com/why_outsource/articles/benefit_outsourcing.asp

Insourcing? What is it?

Insourcing is the opposite of outsourcing; that is insourcing (or contracting in) is often defined as the delegation of operations or jobs from production within a business to an internal (but 'stand-alone') entity that specializes in that operation. The term insourcing is newer, and has several definitions that aren’t exactly the opposite of outsourcing, which can be somewhat complicated to understand.

The type of insourcing that represents almost an opposite form of outsourcing may be the most common definition. This is when companies look at their pool of employees to find those who may be tapped to do certain needed jobs. They may offer these employees extra training or they may merely find the employees that already possess the skills to take on specialty work.

This form of insourcing has become fairly common as a money saving practice. Hiring new employees can take considerable funds, and being able to redirect a current employee to new work can be much easier. Even if there is financial outlay for special training, a business may still save money, and it doesn’t have the negative connotations associated with many forms of outsourcing. Some companies practice this regularly and may boast to employees that they always promote from within, which can be an attractive point when employees are looking for jobs that will allow them opportunities to advance in their careers.

A different form of insourcing doesn’t utilize current employees but instead temporarily hires specialists to work onsite at a company. Occasionally these specialists help train employees on specialized equipment or methods, and part of this may also involve the leasing of various types of equipment. Even though the temporary employee comes from outside of the company, the fact that he or she is “brought in” means he can be considered insourced.

Sometimes the definition of insourcing is a matter of perspective. When a large company sets up part of their business in a foreign country, that company is outsourcing. However, to the country where the business is established, the new work there may be considered as insourced.This is a less common use of the term, but one that may help demonstrate the differing ways in which outsourcing work is viewed.

Insourcing is widely used in an area such as production to reduce costs of taxes, labor (e.g., American labor is often cheaper than European labor), transportation, etc.

Insourcing can be viewed as outsourcing as seen from the opposite side. For example, a company based in Japan might open a plant in the United States for the purpose of employing American workers to manufacture Japanese products. From the Japanese perspective this is outsourcing, but from the American perspective it is insourcing. Nissan, a Japanese automobile manufacturer, has in fact done this.

Sources:

http://www.prospects.ac.uk/p/types_of_job/it_consultant_job_description.jsp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/infrastructur http://www.wisegeek.com/does-outsourcing-really-save-money.htm http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci1185946,00.html

To Outsource Or Insource?

Outsourcing can provide technological advantages but loss of control is a problem.

As companies have grown more comfortable with the shared service approach, some have asked whether it makes sense to move a step further and hire an outside party to run the operation, says Tim Lloyd, partner with London-based ALS Consulting Ltd. On the positive side, a third party that focuses only on shared services may be more likely to invest in new tools and technology. Going with a third party also may enable a company to more quickly launch a shared service operation.

On the other hand, some loss of control is likely. Executives wouldn't want to outsource functions that are unique to their company, notes Richard Sypniewski, practice director for accounting and finance operations with Parson Consulting, Chicago. For instance, a company that produces highly engineered products may negotiate individual contracts with each client. Before management transfers responsibility for accounts receivable to an outside firm, it will want to determine how much information the firm will need, and the extent to which the firm will be able to act on its own when working with clients.

Know When to Send Projects out the Door

With many companies shipping work to India, Russia, and other parts of the globe, offshore outsourcing has been the hot topic in tech circles recently.Yet many IT managers are finding that when it comes to getting outside help, assistance is usually much closer to home.

With IT budgets tight and staff members overburdened, hiring consultants or other outside experts can be a boon for productivity and a way to keep operations running smoothly. Certainly, too, there are plenty of independent gurus eagerly waiting for business and ready to rent out their expertise. Frequently outsourced work includes data backup and recovery services, training, recruitment, application development integration, and project management.

The decision about whether to outsource work is only the first step in a longer list of choices. IT managers must decide how they're going to use internal resources and how the outsourcing relationship will be managed.

Considering all of these direct and indirect costs, outsourcing may be a good solution. It allows you to instantly acquire the required skill set and quickly deploy an improved landing page.

Perspective

Thinking outside the box is difficult if you work in it. Your experience in your industry, company, and department conspire to straitjacket you with invisible assumptions. It's hard to throw away all of your biases and beliefs and come up with truly original approaches to testing.

http://searchenginewatch.com/3630742

What's best for your Organization?

Outsourcing…

Outsourcing began in the early eighties when organizations started delegating their non-core functions to an external organization that was specialized in providing a particular service, function or product. In outsourcing, the external organization would take on the management of the outsourced function.

Most organizations choose outsourcing because outsourcing offers a lot of advantages. When organizations outsource to countries like India, they benefit from lower costs and high-quality services. Moreover organizations can concentrate more on core functions once they outsource their non-core functions. Outsourcing can also help organizations make better use of their resources, time and infrastructure.

In outsourcing, the outsourcer and the outsourcing partner have a greater relationship when compared to the relationship between a buyer and a seller. In outsourcing, the outsourcer trusts the outsourcing partner with vital information. Outsourcing is no longer confined to the outsourcing of IT services. Outsourcers in the US and UK now outsource financial services, engineering services, creative services, data entry services and much more.

Most organizations are opting to outsource because outsourcing enables organizations to access intellectual capital, focus on core competencies, shorten the delivery cycle time and reduce costs significantly. Organizations feel outsourcing is an effective business strategy to help improve their business.

Insourcing…

The internal entity will usually have a specialized team who will be proficient in the providing the required services. Organizations sometimes opt for insourcing because it enables them to maintain a better control of what they outsource. Insourcing has also come to be defined as transferring work from one organization to another organization which is located within the same country. Insourcing can also mean an organization building a new business centre or facility which would specialize in a particular service or product.

Organizations involved in production usually opt for insourcing in order to cut down the cost of labor and taxes amongst others. The trend towards insourcing has increased since the year 2006. Organizations who have been dissatisfied with outsourcing have moved towards insourcing. Some organizations feel that they can have better customer support and better control over the work outsourced by insourcing their work rather than outsourcing it. According to recent studies, there is more wok insourced than outsourced in the U.S and U.K. These countries are currently the largest outsourcers in the world. The U.S and U.K outsource and insource work equally.

Recommendation…

If your organization has a number of non-core processes which are taking plenty of time, effort and resources to perform in-house, it would be wise to outsource these non-core functions. Outsourcing in this case, would help you save on time, effort, manpower and would also aid you in making quicker deliveries to your customers.

If you require expertise services in areas which do not fall under your core competency, then outsourcing will be a good option as you can get access to expertise services. For reducing costs and making faster deliverables, outsourcing is again a good option.

If your work involves production, then it would be more ideal for your organization to opt for insourcing, as you can save on transportation costs and exercise a better control over your project.

It is not necessary to choose outsourcing over insourcing or vice versa. Your organization can outsource and insource at the same time. By outsourcing and insourcing simultaneously, you can have the best of what both offers and your business can get a competitive advantage!

http://www.outsource2india.com/why_india/articles/outsourcing-versus-insourcing.asp

HRM (Assignment 10)

2009-09-30T07:36:00.000-07:00

PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT and HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Personnel Management
R.J. Reddy

“ Personnel Management is that phase of management which deals with the effective control and use of manpower as distinguished from other sources of power. The methods, tools and techniques designed and utilized to secure the enthusiastic participation of labour represent the subject matter in study of personnel administration” – Dale Yoder

Critique: I agree this definition. I think the author of this justifies his understanding on the concept and meaning of the subject. So think, it is more likely to say that this defines what is personnel management really means.

“Personnel Management is that part of management process which is primarily concerned with the human constituents of an organization”. – E.F.L Breach

Critique: So I guess, this definition gives a direct subject and from the word itself, “personnel management”, it primarily deals with persons.

“Personnel Management is that specialized branch of management which is concerned with solving the human problems of an organization intelligently and equitably in a manner that not only the employee potentials are developed but maximum satisfaction is also achieved by the individual, the group and the executives or managers and the goals of the organization are accomplished to the fullest possible extent”. – Dr. T.N Bhagoliwal

Critique: I think this definition is more likely above. Only, the author gives a deep meaning to he subject and how will it going to handle. And also, it says about he goals that a certain organization wants to achieve.

Source: http://books.google.com.ph/books

Personnel Management - Administrative discipline of hiring and developing employees so that they become more valuable to the organization. It includes:

(1) conducting job analysis
(2) planning personnel needs, and recruitment
(3) selecting the right people for the job
(4) orienting and training
(5) determining and managing wages and salaries
(6) providing benefits and incentives
(7) appraising performance
( resolving deputes
(9) communicating with all employees at all levels.

Source: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/personnel-management.html

Critique: I think this one enumerate the process on how will a management involving personnel should be handled. And I guess the author of this subject sees the flow of personnel management. I agree with the process cited above. Human resource should be given benefits that will equal to their industrial contribution of a certain company.

Personnel Management is responsible for the provision of specialist personnel and human resource management advisory services to departments, and the development and implementation of a relevant, coherent and modern framework of employment policies and practices throughout the University. Each member of Personnel Management is responsible for the provision of these services to a number of departments. This distribution is known as the Personnel Management Portfolio.

Personnel Management is also responsible for the delivery of the Human Resource Strategy and associated programmes of work.

Critique: For this definition from a university form of organization, I could say that it is well defined and it seems effective in the implementation. Also, It is associated with the Human Resource Strategy that’s why I believe that it is effective this way. It’s like a combination of the both or more strategies to result a more effective output.

Source: Staffordshire University website
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/uniservices/personnel/management/index.php *********************************************************************************************
Human Resource Management (HRM)

Administrative activities associated with human resources planning, recruitment, selection, orientation, training, appraisal, motivation, remuneration, etc. HRM aims at developing people through work.

Critique: For me, I might say that these two (personnel management and HRM) should go along to have a good result.

Source: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/human-resource-management-HRM.html

Human Resource Management (HRM) is the function within an organization that focuses on recruitment of, management of, and providing direction for the people who work in the organization. Human Resource Management can also be performed by line managers.

Human Resource Management is the organizational function that deals with issues related to people such as compensation, hiring, performance management, organization development, safety, wellness, benefits, employee motivation, communication, administration, and training.

Critique: I would say that HRM focused on the process involving human resource. But I could see the similarity of both PM and HRM because it deals with the same subject which is persons/human. Only that I supposed that PM talks more on the needs of the human resource while the HRM talks not only their needs but deals with the persons behavior, attitude etc.

Source: http://humanresources.about.com/od/glossaryh/f/hr_management.htm

Human Resource Management is a model of personnel management that focuses on the individual rather than taking a collective approach. Responsibility for human resource management is often devolved to line management. It is characterized by an emphasis on strategic integration, employee commitment, workforce flexibility, and quality of goods and services.

Source: http://dictionary.bnet.com/definition/human+resource+management.html

Critique: I think this definition hit my idea on how to differentiate the two despite their similarities in dealing both human resources.

While Miller (1987) suggests that Human Respurce Management relates to:
".......those decisions and actions which concern the management of employees at all levels in the business and which are related to the implementation of strategies directed towards creating and sustaining competitive advantage" (p. 352).

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resource_management

Critique: Well, it’s more likely a decision-making that concerns the management of the employees. While Personnel Management tries to be effective in the control of manpower, HRM tried to hold an effective decision-making.

Reaccessing Human Resource Management
Edited by: Paul Blyton and Peter Turnbull

Keith Sisson, editor of Human Resource Management Journal applies the term HRM ‘in the most general of senses to refer to the policies, procedures and processes involved in the management of people in work organizations (1990:1).

Similarly, Michael Poole, editor of International Journal of Human Resource argues that beyond the central aspect of HRM being the link with business policy and strategic management, ‘the subject is perhaps best viewed as involving a synthesis of elements from international business, organizational behavior, personnel management and industrial relations’ (1990:1-2)

Source: http://www.google.com.ph/books?

Critique: It simply gives the summary of understanding the concept of HRM. And I like the idea that it is summarize into simple views. And I think, every organization had their own formulation of concept and strategies that they find to be effective.

MIS (Assignment 7)

2009-09-29T16:06:00.000-07:00

Creation of ICT Department (Information and Communications Technology)

“Let’s have a Department of ICT”

The Commission on Information and Communication Technology (CICT) hopes that the bill that seeks to establish the Department of ICT will be approved before the term of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ends next year. The CICT was created in 2004 as a transitory measure to a DICT (Department of ICT) but five years have passed, and this has yet to become a reality. (By Ehda M. Dagoo) As a country who aims to lead globally, there should be a portal to have this goal. As the new technology continues to invade the global arena, the Philippines have to cope up the fast changing and fast growing modernization. Thus, the realization of having an ICT Department who will take part of the IT innovation is a big, big plus. How will the creation of an ICT Department improved our quality of life? Well for me, it will really help in terms of technological way of living. We should bear in mind that though we could say that the Philippines are among the leading country in Asia in terms of ICT, still, there are less fortunate that could not afford even to go to the Net café’s to be able to give a try on using techno gadgets. While if the passage of this bill will be granted, there would be allotted budget for the ICT. For the education, it could help in computer literacy for high school students or even elementary pupils who will benefit this program. And for computer laboratories and internet connections in various schools, colleges and universities supported by the government. Also, the CICT plans to give priority to the next wave cities in the country, thus, giving hopes to the nation to improve the people’s quality of life in the eWorld.

Telecommunications

I guess this area limit its talk in the controversial expiration of loads, dropped calls and missing loads. And also, the electronic issues. And this area relates ICT because as obvious as it is, Philippines is a texting capital. Even the young ones had their cellphones, ipods, and etc. This area had its pros and cons in improving our quality of life. We knew that having this modern way of communications made our routine easier, faster and accurate. Unlike before, information will be scattered in a split of seconds or just a click away. That’s how nice to consider the improvement of Telecommunications. But also, it gives a disadvantage. In the first place, it adds our usual expenses. And the load issues are additional expenses and were disgraceful because it was stolen from you (consumers). Thus, it’s up for the individual to balance their way to carry these changes.

Technical Education and Skills Training

This area is also important in improving our quality of life. For me, given this chance to benefit technical education and skills training could be a plus in improving the many lives of individuals especially those who can’t afford or do not like to enroll degree courses. As we are covered with new innovations and as the technology advancement continue to rise, a skill is very important to compete. Thus, skills training especially related to IT will help an individual to compete in the industry.

MIS (Assignment 5)

2009-09-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

For the following months, we focused on how IS/IT is very important to the operations of a company. This time, we are going to point out the barriers and challenges in IS/IT Implementation. With the same company we visited for the first assignment, I would like to share about the case at EMCOR.

EMCOR, like any other companies used a computer-based information system which means that information during any transactions that will take place and data records of the company is stored in a specific application software in a computer system and being used when automates some of the information-processing activities of the company. This is where Information System has taken its place to make their work easier, accurate and faster than its traditional way of keeping records. While Information Technology serves as a help of their company in terms of general ledger to financial report because it is well structured and properly documented. Internal reporting was made manually and only periodically, as a by-product of the accounting system and with some additional statistics, and gave limited and delayed information on management performance long before the spark of new technology.

When we say barriers, most probably it is any condition that makes it difficult to achieve a certain objective or to make any progress in a certain goal.

Say for example a case such having a perspective to implement successfully. In a situation such like, there are critical perspectives that must be managed properly. And these perspectives must be addressed in parallel to ensure that all aspects are dealt with and that the project is completed in time. See the following:

1. Project Management
- on time and within budget

2. Process Management
- ensure that business system supports the customer’s business processes

3. Solution Management
- Designing and configuring the right solution to support customer processes

4. Data Management
- Optimal management of data in the new system and migration of data from the old system.

5. Technology Management
- Configuring and installing the right technical platform and environment.

These are some of the critical areas to be considered and be managed properly to achieve its goal to implement successfully. Now, let’s try to consider some phases in implementing a project/system. According to what I have surf through the internet, the following are the three distinct phases in a typical project implementation:

Implementation Study

In the Implementation Study, we specify the solution and focus on what has to be done. Match the best-practice business processes with customer-critical business processes.

Project Management

Scope & formation
Planning
Organization
Staffing
Site readiness assessment
Appoint steering committee
Documentation
Audits & reviews

Process Management

Definition of business-critical processes
Core team training
Solution Management
Variance analysis (modifications, integrations, etc.)
Package planning

Data Management

Data migration strategy
Data identification

Technology Management

Implementation environment definition
Infrastructure and system architecture
Definition & strategy
Training environment installation

Implementation

During implementation, there should be configuration and adapting the system that was specified during the Implementation Study. The business processes and the solution are validated, and the technical infrastructure is installed and configured. And if necessary, develop customizations such as integrations with other systems.

Project Management

Goals and delimitations
Planning
Organization
Staffing
Implementation kickoff
Steering committee
Documentation
Audits & reviews

Process Management

Work routine development
Process model validation
Core team training
Preparation of end-user training

Solution Management

Package development and delivery
Training material
Core team training
Application solution validation

Data Management

Data collection
Data cleansing
Data migration module configuration
Data migration (trial)
Data validation

Technology Management

Implementation environment installations
Infrastructure and system architecture implementation
Technical training

Go Live

The new enterprise system is now put into operation. End-user training is completed, data from the old system are migrated to the new, and users start working according to work routines that have been developed. The entire customer solution is validated in an extensive test by end-users using full-scale production data in order to confirm that the system meets the targets that were set when the project started. Together with the customer, it should be confirmed that customer expectations are fulfilled. If the customer has facilities at different sites, go live first at the pilot site, and, after evaluation, at the other sites, according to the site rollout plan.

Project Management

Goals and delimitations
Planning
Organization
Staffing
Steering committee
Documentation
Audits & reviews

Process Management

Work routine validation
End-user training

Solution Management

End-user training
Customer solution validation
Customer support routines fully operational

Data Management

Data migration (full-scale)
Data validation

Technology Management

Implementation environment validation & fine-tuning
Infrastructure and system architecture validation & fine-tuning
Technical training

Now, we had ideas on how to obtain our goal which is to implement a successful project. But of course, it is not easy to be done without an expected barriers and hindrances. Let’s go back to the adopted company.

As a recap during our interview with the interviewee, last July 2009 we tackled little about IT/IS Implementation. See for instance, the interviewee said that during a time that EMCOR is planning to change their system into a centralized connection where each branches can access the transactions happened any time in every other stores. One of the benefits in the system would be; the customer from one place could pay his accounts through the nearest EMCOR store. But the said changes happened to meet some challenges and barriers that they would have to consider in implementing the new system. The following are to be evaluated:

Project management

- Planning
- Audits & reviews (Cost)
- Implementation kickoff

Process Management

- Variance analysis
- Process model validation
- Preparation of end-user training

Solution Management

- Application solution validation
- End-user training
- Customer solution validation
- Customer support routines fully operational

Data Management

- Data validation
- Data migration (full-scale)
- Data identification

Technology Management

- Training environment installation
- Technical training

And they find the following as the barriers in their IT/IS implementation:

- Data loss and errors
- Possible discrepancies
- Employees to be trained
- Time preparations
- Time consumption
- Establishing accuracy after the implementation
- User’s usage and acceptance

Also, if it happens that the consumer/users don’t like the usage of the new system, it might be a wrong option to shift into a new system.

Source: http://www.ifsworld.com/uk/services/implementation/default.asp

HRM (Assignment 9)

2009-09-08T03:34:00.003-07:00

Before I go down on the concept of nature, scope and role of Human Resource Management, I would like to see a very concise background of a Human Resource Manager.

Human Resource Manager

A human resources manager is responsible for managing and overseeing the personnel department within a company, organization or agency. This includes posting advertisements or approving advertisements for new employees, screening resumes and applications, setting interview appointments and being involved in the hiring process. In most agencies the human resources manager is also key in providing employee supervision and evaluations, retraining employees, offering mediation services for struggling employees as well as firing employees that are not meeting standards.

He must be aware of local, state and federal employment guidelines, manage payroll issues, maintain employee records, complete and record insurance and other programs offered to employees and be able to assist employees in understanding and evaluating the participation in these programs. Human resource managers may also be actively involved in retraining or training new employees or existing employees or answering questions that employees may have on policies or procedures within the company or agency. Workplace safety, employee absenteeism and health issues are also addressed by the human resources manager. The manager may be able to work directly with outside agencies to provide on-site counseling or even specialized programs for additions or crisis intervention counseling or services. Many human resource managers act as the bridge between management and workers in non-union companies. Conflict resolution and improving overall workplace moral is a key part of the role of a human resource manager.

And from the various definitions of Human Resource Management, I like to choose this understanding.

Human Resource Management

Administrative activities associated with human resources planning, recruitment, selection, orientation, training, appraisal, motivation, remuneration, etc. HRM aims at developing people through work.

The Concept on the Nature, Scope and Role of HRM

Human resources may be defined as the total knowledge, skills, creative abilities, talents and aptitudes of an organization's workforce, as well as the values, attitudes, approaches and beliefs of the individuals involved in the affairs of the organization. It is the sum total or aggregate of inherent abilities, acquired knowledge and skills represented by the talents and aptitudes of the persons employed in the organization.

The human resources are multidimensional in nature. From the national point of view, human resources may be defined as the knowledge, skills, creative abilities, talents and aptitudes obtained in the population; whereas from the viewpoint of the individual enterprise, they represent the total of the inherent abilities, acquired knowledge and skills as exemplified in the talents and aptitudes of its employees.

Nature:

Human Resource Management is a process of bringing people and organizations together so that the goals of each are met. The various features of HRM include:

- It is pervasive in nature as it is present in all enterprises.
- Its focus is on results rather than on rules.
- It tries to help employees develop their potential fully.
- It encourages employees to give their best to the organization.
- It is all about people at work, both as individuals and groups.
- It tries to put people on assigned jobs in order to produce good results. -
It helps an organization meet its goals in the future by providing for competent and well-motivated employees.
- It tries to build and maintain cordial relations between people working at various levels in the organization.
- It is a multi-disciplinary activity, utilizing knowledge and inputs drawn from psychology, economics, etc.

Scope

The scope of HRM is very wide:

Personnel aspect-This is concerned with manpower planning, recruitment, selection, placement, transfer, promotion, training and development, layoff and retrenchment, remuneration, incentives, productivity etc.

Welfare aspect-It deals with working conditions and amenities such as canteens, creches, rest and lunch rooms, housing, transport, medical assistance, education, health and safety, recreation facilities, etc.

Industrial relations aspect-This covers union-management relations, joint consultation, collective bargaining, grievance and disciplinary procedures, settlement of disputes, etc.

Role

The existence of a human resources department is vital to overall productivity and efficiency of the strong workforce in any thriving company. In most professional organizations, the role of the human resources department is not sidelined or eclipsed by other departments. In fact, good human resources can be one of the most valued and respected departments in an organization; their job is people, and people are the company's most important asset.

The human resource function has gone from the traditional hire and fire role to a strategic partner at the table with finance, operations and other business centers that are not centers of profit for the organization. The job of HR, as is the job of all such departments, is to ensure that the business gets the most out of its employees. Another way to put this is that the human resource management needs to provide a high return on the business's investment in its people. This makes it a highly complex function - because it deals with not just management issues but human ones as well.

Strategic Role for HR

- “contributing at the table” to organizational results
- HR becomes a strategic partners by:

Focusing on developing HR programs that enhance organizational performance
Involving HR at the strategic planning onset
Participating on decision making on mergers, acquisitions and downsizing
Redesigning organizations and work processes
Accounting and documenting the financial result of HR activities

In the case of the visited company (Ansuico, Incorporated):

As I could remember during an interview with the company’s HR manager, she mentioned less on the nature, scope and roles of the HR Management. It’s because, they were not allowed to talk much about the company for the reason that the management keeps it confidential. Below are from the above information that befit the company’s nature, scope and role of HR Management:

Nature:

- It tries to help employees develop their potential fully. -
It encourages employees to give their best to the organization.
- It is all about people at work, both as individuals and groups.
- It tries to put people on assigned jobs in order to produce good results. -
It helps an organization meet its goals in the future by providing for competent and well-motivated employees.

Scope:

Personnel aspect
- concerned with manpower planning, recruitment, selection, placement, training and development, incentives, productivity etc.

Welfare aspect
-It deals with working conditions and amenities such as trainings, assistance, education, health and safety, etc.

Industrial relations aspect
-This covers union-management relations, joint consultation, collective bargaining, grievance and disciplinary procedures, settlement of disputes, etc.

Roles:

- Aiding in the self-development of employees at all levels.
- Developing and maintaining motivation for workers by providing incentives.
- Recruitment, selection and placement of personnel.
- Training and development of employees

Administrative role
- clerical and administrative support operations (payroll and benefits work)
- Technology is transforming how HR services are delivered Operational and Employee

Advocate Role
- “champion” for employee concerns
- Employee crisis management -
Responding to employee complaints

References:

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/human-resource-management-HRM.html http://www.jobprofiles.org/bushrmanager.htm http://ezinearticles.com/?Human-Resource-Management---Nature,-Scope,-Objectives-and-Function&id=2658370 http://www.scribd.com/doc/12925140/CHANGING-NATURE-OF-HUMAN-RESOURCE-MANAGEMENT http://jobfunctions.bnet.com/abstract.aspx?docid=260304&promo=100511

HRM (Assignment 8)

2009-09-08T03:34:00.001-07:00

The SONA 2009

Her administration faced many challenges, full of accusations and threatens by the opponents who fight for what they believe in. But despite the allegations that surround her undisputed presidency, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo delivered her State of the Nation Address last July 27, 2009.

The said SONA receives both critique and salutation. As we could expect, her opponents will continue to throw their mouths on her and for those who believed her will give her applause.

On her SONA, the president cited the progress of the country despite global crisis. And one area that was mentioned was related to the Human Resource Management. What are these manpower relations and how will these become a way to improve our quality of life?

Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW’s)

The country cannot support the needs of jobs for many of the Filipinos, thus, most of our countrymen has to find their luck to the other countries. With these, the OFW’s played a very dramatic role in supporting our dying (as many said) economy. It records $ 16 B last year and is expected to grow this year. What an advantage isn’t it? But the hard work, perseverance and sacrifices of our fellowmen cannot be equalized. For they endure loneliness to be away from home.

“Meanwhile, we should make their sacrifices worthwhile,” the president quoted. She said that we have to protect and give importance with the earnings the OFWs gained. And that was through a stronger consumer protection for OFWs to property and products back home. Thus, Investors Protection Task Force is addressed.

When we will try to see the brighter side of this area, we could say that it contributed an improvement and progress to our quality of life. Aside from the fact that the government cannot suffice our needs for jobs, we should have to work for the family to have a better life style. And some find the answer through going across the sea. Though it was very hard then to be far away from home, looking at the future will give courage to choose an overseas work if there’s an opportunity. It improves the quality of life because as we could see, if one will find a better job there, then he/she could support the financial needs of the family. The shelter, education, foods, clothing etc… Therefore, we could see the difference if we will just sit here and wait for the years to come and the problems will still not be addressed or find the right thing to do at the moment despite that the exchange would be our happiness, if it’s for the betterment of the family, we can bear the pain and loneliness. Filipinos are tough!

Technical Education and Skills Training

This one is really a big help. The popularity of TESDA has contributed a lot of opportunities for those who had never get the chance or those who doesn’t like to enroll in degree courses. Like the one the president had mentioned, “Narito si Jennifer Silbor, isa sa sampung milyong trainee. Natuto siya ng medical transcription. Now, as an independent contractor and lecturer for transcriptions in Davao, kumikita siya ng P18,000 bawat buwan. Good job, Jennifer”. It only shows that there are many possibilities and chances to improve our quality of life only if we have the courage to find it. And of course, the government had been helping to made it possible. And this type of trainings engaged in a less consuming time, therefore, you will not spend many years to have the changes in your life. And with hard work, honesty and perseverance, a successful life would be a guarantee.

CARP

The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) was a land reform law mandated by Republic Act No. 6657, signed by President Corazon Aquino on June 10, 1988. It was the fifth land reform law in fifty years, following the land reform laws of Presidents Manuel Quezon, Ramon Magsaysay, Diosdado Macapagal and Ferdinand Marcos.
According to RA 6657, CARP aims “for a more equitable distribution and ownership of land.” It meant to distribute lands to farmers in a span of 10 years, but was extended by the 11th Congress due to delays in land distribution and lack of budget allocation.
Section 3 of RA 6657 defined agrarian reform as the “redistribution of lands, regardless of crops or fruits produced, to farmers and regular farm workers who are landless” and “all other arrangements alternative to the physical redistribution of lands, such as production or profit-sharing, labor administration and the distribution of shares of stock which will allow beneficiaries to receive a just share of the fruits of the lands they work.”
Vast agricultural lands are distributed to the farmers tilling the land, whereas only a maximum of five hectares can be retained by the landlords and three hectares for each of their children.
However, a common CARP loophole was that landlords escaped relinquishing their lands through land reclassifications. Lands classified by local zoning ordinances as residential, commercial and industrial lands are excluded from CARP.

SOURCE:
Department of Agrarian Reform website, http://www.dar.gov.ph (By Neil Jerome C. Morales)

“Sa pagpapamahagi ng milyun-milyong ektaryang lupa, 700,000 na katutubo at mahigit isang milyong benepisyaryo ng CARP ay taas-noong may-ari na ng sariling lupa. Hinihiling ko sa Kongreso na ipasa agad ang pagpapalawig ng CARP, at dapat ma-condone ang P42 billion na land reform liabilities dahil 18% lamang ang nabayaran mula 1972. Napapanahon, it’s timely because it will unfreeze the rural property market. Ang mahal kong ama ang nag-emancipate ng mga magsasaka. Ii-mancipate naman natin ngayon ang titulo”, the president said.
The passage of this Act gives hopes to the people who dedicate their life in tilting the land to have their own. As the president has told, millions of hectares have been distributed for the people to have their own land. And since this State policy promotes the rights and welfare of landless Filipino farmers and farm workers, as well as social justice, in pursuit of sound rural development and industrialization. The many years of sacrificed have been justified. It is established to help landless Filipino farmers to own directly or collectively the lands they till or, in the case of farm workers, to have a share of the fruits harvested or produced. Thus, it improves the quality of living because the farmers will not depend on their landlords when it comes to their shares during reaping time. They can have their own income and there’s no need to cut portions that won’t equal their effort. They could produce their own farm products without a need to worry that they might receive less than what they sow. They wouldn’t be a slave to their own right but they were now a master of their own property.

Education

“Ang magandang edukasyon ay susi sa mas magandang buhay, the great equalizer that allows every young Filipino a chance to realize their dreams”, president Arroyo.

"It seeks to mainstream early childhood development in basic education. Our children are our most cherished possession. In their early years we must make sure they get a healthy start in life. They must receive the right food for a healthy body, the right education for a bright and inquiring mind—and the equal opportunity for a meaningful job".

They said that the quality of manpower of a nation can be justified by the figure of educated persons belonging in it. Will it mean that education must be a key to achieve progress and development? Probably yes! If we could see, powerful nation’s starts with their creative minds, thus, they were able to sustain the needs and growth of their territory. But it doesn’t meant that the Filipinos were left behind in terms of powerful minds, maybe, we were just influenced by our culture, thus, affecting our drive to a more progressive way of living.

Our educational system should make the Filipino fit not just for whatever jobs happen to be on offer today, but also for whatever economic challenge life will throw in their way. For the government believes that education is one strongest way to establish a strong nation. From basic to vocational school or college, the government tried to sustain their needs, financial needs.

Education improves the quality of life. If all of the Filipinos can have the chance to enroll themselves and went to school, everyone can get a better job, everyone knows how to use their time, everyone knows their responsibility as an individual, everyone knows how to be productive and no one will have to suffer poverty. Though others might say that education is not the only way to uplift their status, it can’t be denied that it is the main door to enter the possibility of our dreams. Education improves the quality of life because it has its way that people will realize the importance of their existence. And more so…

Tax Revenues

“We will work to increase tax effort through improved collections and new sin taxes to further our capacity to reduce poverty and pursue growth. Revenue enhancement must come from the Department of Finance plugging leaks and catching tax and customs cheats. I call on tax paying citizens and tax paying businesses, help the BIR and stop those tax cheats”.

This will help the improvement because the returns can be a benefit to all. The infrastructures, the roads, and any other government projects help the people. Though many claims that they cannot feel the benefit from the taxes they’re paying, still, it cant be denied that, sometimes, we were just trying to ignore the existence of the projects that the government give back to our community.

HRM (Assignment 7)

2009-09-08T03:33:00.001-07:00

The Human Being

It is commonplace for people generally to think of the human body as being merely an elaborate machine, with all the non-material aspects of the human being- thinking, feeling, attitudes, emotions, mores, imagination, etc., etc, as being merely the result of the physico-chemical activities which take place in the physical body. However, the human organism is not a machine and does not operate under the aegis of chemical and physical laws.

Human beings are the most important…

Among any other creation of God, human being is the most important. It’s because human beings are one, merely one, of the many living beings that originated in a long and complicated process of evolution despite the fact that many philosophical and religious arguments have been constructed to ideologically underpin the idea that human beings are the focus and goal of the cosmos and of cosmic evolution. It is important to understand what we are as human beings. Amongst living beings, humans enjoy great abilities and capacities. We are special and precious and there’s no other around the universe that can compare to our uniqueness. The present state of knowledge of the human being is one which has been informed by the materialistic thinking of modern technological science.

Manpower is the most important because human is the heart of an organization. In the first place, there are no existing tangibles without the presence of humanity. Despite the age of technology, human is the core of all the activities that has taken place in an organization. Organization composed of individuals and these individuals are human individuals who addressed the status and put life to an organization.

…potent and critical resource…

Yes! Human beings are he wielding power of an organization. Among any other assets, human being is the only one that is incomparable. There’s no other like that could give beyond what the human can. And most critical, yes!Because human has its limitations. We get tired, we need rest, we need water, food and shelter. Humans are critical because we can be sick and died if we overused our body. We are critical because once we are broken; we cannot be fixed like a machine. Once we are destroyed, we cannot be replaced. We are critical because we need much attention and human need cares and understanding among any other resources of an organization.

Yet, human beings are the least understood and worst managed…

Sometimes our differences and pride has overcome our senses and it could create judgment, opinions, doubts and even lost of trust.

HRM (Assignment 6)

2009-09-08T03:14:00.000-07:00

What is a corporation?

In a general sense, a corporation is a business entity that is given many of the same legal rights as an actual person. Corporations may be made up of a single person or a group of people, known as sole corporations or aggregate corporations, respectively.

Source:
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-corporation.htm

A corporation is a legal entity separate from the persons who own it or the persons who manage or operate it. In British tradition it is the term designating a body corporate, where it can be either a corporation sole (an office held by an individual natural person, which is a legal entity separate from that person) or a corporation aggregate (involving more persons). In American and, increasingly, international usage, the term denotes a body corporate formed to conduct business, and this meaning of corporation is discussed in the remaining part of this entry (the limited company in British usage).

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation

The Corporation...

The corporation's fate over the next century is as fascinating to contemplate as it is difficult to predict. But as a general proposition, there is no reason to think that the corporation has reached the limits of its adaptive powers. Over the decades, it has proven a remarkably flexible vehicle for spreading commercial risk (and reward) and for organizing investment on a great scale over vast geographic distances. As we speed ahead into a future that is unknowable by definition, it is useful to pause and glance in the rearview mirror. Today's corporation is not an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the future. It is the product of a long and tumultuous history, of opportunities grasped and crises overcome--and it is all the stronger for it.

The transformation...

Because of the spark of the rapid development of new technologies, particularly the Internet, the corporation is undergoing a radical transformation that is reaching far across the globe and in every corner of the world. From the early practices, features and structures, corporation in the 21st century will show off beyond what we can imagine.

The Web gives everyone in the organization, the ability to access a mind-boggling array of information in just a click, from anywhere. Instead of seeping out over months or years, ideas can be spread out around the globe in the blink of an eye. That means that the 21st century Corporation must adapt itself to management via the Web. Already, old business models that emphasized fixed assets, working capital, and economies of scale have become increasingly vulnerable to nimbler organizations that employ new technologies to reduce costs.

Leading-edge technology will enable workers on the bottom rungs of the organization to seize opportunity as it arises. Employees will increasingly feel the pressure to get breakthrough ideas to market first. Thus, the corporation will need to nurture an array of formal and informal networks to ensure that these ideas can speed into development. In the near future, companies will call on outside contractors to assemble teams of designers, prototype producers, manufacturers, and distributors to get the job done. Emerging technologies will allow employees and freelancers anywhere in the world to converse in numerous languages online without the need for a translator.

And this rapid flow of information will permeate the organization. We could imagine that orders will be fulfilled electronically without a single phone call or piece of paper. The ''virtual financial close'' will put real-time sales and profit figures at every manager's fingertips via the click of a wireless phone or a spoken command to a computer. And in just a blink of an eye, everything you wanted to know about your company will come in just a second.

Making a Difference...

In the beginning, the global company was defined as one that simply sold its goods in overseas markets. Later, global companies assumed a manufacturing presence in numerous countries. The company of the future will call on talent and resources--especially intellectual capital--wherever they can be found around the globe, just as it will sell its goods and services around the globe. Indeed, the very notion of a headquarters country may no longer apply, as companies migrate to places of greatest advantage. The new global corporation might be based in the U.S. but do its software programming in Sri Lanka, its engineering in Germany, and its manufacturing in China. Every outpost will be seamlessly connected by the Net so that far-flung employees and freelancers can work together in real time. All this work will be done in an instant. With the use of the internet, speed is the biggest impact in terms of actions, deliberations, and information. And it leaves the old, process-oriented corporation in a total revamp. With everything from product cycles to employee turnover on fast-forward, there is simply not enough time for deliberation.

It is said that the very core of the 21st century Corporation is technology. It simply means that human minds and hands have been removed from an organization's most routine tasks and replaced them with computers and networks. Having this ideal to digitize everything from employee benefits to accounts receivables to product design cuts time, cost, and people from operations, resulting in huge savings and vast improvements in speed.

Despite a handful of leading-edge companies, the true 21st century corporation, at least as it will eventually emerge, does not yet exist. But there is no one company today that embodies all the possibilities and promise of the super efficient 21st century corporation.

The truly great 21st century companies will recognize that the real power of technology is not just the ability to make a business more efficient but also its potential to spark transformative change. Much of that change will involve the company's relationship with its customers. In an era of unprecedented choice, in which prices and product specs for almost anything are only a click away, companies will have to offer a lot more than bargain prices.

True 21st century corporations will also learn to manage an elaborate network of external relationships. That far-reaching ecosystem of suppliers, partners, and contractors will allow them to focus on what they do best and farm everything else out. And it will let them quickly take advantage of fleeting opportunities without having to tie up vast amounts of capital. Outsourcing and partnering, of course, are hardly new. But in the coming century, such alliances will become more crucial.

http://www.businessweek.com/common_frames

HRM (Assignment 5)

2009-08-30T15:36:00.001-07:00

DOWNSIZING! The very term strikes fear in the heart of many. But given today’s financial crisis, downsizing has become a nightmare turns to reality for many organizations.

What is Downsizing?

According to the common source which is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff, downsizing is the ‘conscious use of permanent personnel reductions in an attempt to improve efficiency and/or effectiveness’ (Budros 1999, p. 70).

Another definition of downsizing by Huber & Glick, (1993) is "a set of activities ... undertaken on the part of management, designed to improve organizational efficiency, productivity, and/or competitiveness. It represents a strategy that affects the size of the firm's workforce and its work processes"(p.24).

Huber & Glick (1993) sites key attributes of downsizing :
(1) downsizing is intentional;
(2) downsizing usually involves, although is not limited to, reductions in personnel;
(3) downsizing is focused on improving the efficiency of the organization; and
(4) downsizing affects work processes knowingly or unknowingly.

In the corporate world or business enterprise, downsizing is reducing the number of employees on the operating payroll. It only means a loss of one’s job and workforce reduction of an organization. And there are number of corporations that undergone downsizing process. One to be named is the Colgate-Palmolive Company.

What is a Colgate-Palmolive Company?
http://www.colgate.com

Colgate-Palmolive Company is an American diversified multinational corporation focused on the production, distribution and provision of household, health care and personal products, such as soaps, detergents, and oral hygiene products (including toothpaste and toothbrushes). Under its "Hill's" brand, it is also a manufacturer of veterinary products. The company's corporate offices are on Park Avenue in New York City, across from the Waldorf Astoria.

Causes / Reasons of downsizing

Their aimed is to improve global competitiveness through cutting costs and improving efficiencies. During this time, 24 of Colgate's 112 global factories will be closed or reconfigured. Some 3,000 workers worldwide, which are 8.5 percent of their 36,000 workforce, will lose their jobs. For these restructuring and administrative changes, Colgate will take a $369 million after tax charge in the third quarter.The main reasons for Colgate's recent restructuring are:

(1) Reduced trade barriers in Europe and Latin America;
(2) The need for new technology in manufacturing to improve competitiveness;
(3) The trend toward more concentrated products such as laundry detergent, which requires less production; and
(4) Acquisitions that result in adding more plants.

Cameron and Associates found three implementation strategies: workforce reduction, organizational redesign, and a systematic strategy focused on changing the attitudes, values, and culture of the organization (Huber & Glick, 1993).

Workforce Reduction

The focus is mainly on headcount reduction and employs such tactics as early retirement, transfers and out-placement, buy-out packages, golden parachutes, attrition, job banks, and layoffs or firings. It is most often done by top-down directives, and almost always implemented across-the-board since the goal is to reduce headcount numbers quickly. The disadvantages of this method are it is difficult to predict who will be eliminated and who will remain, and impossible to determine what knowledge and critical skills will be lost to the organization. The advantages are it provides immediate reduction, captures the attention of members of the organization to the seriousness of conditions, motivates cost savings, and creates readiness in the organization for further change (Cole, 1995).

Organizational Redesign

This approach aims at cutting out work in addition to or in place of eliminating workers. Strategies include eliminating functions, hierarchical levels, divisions, or products; consolidating and merging units; and reducing work hours. These are medium-term strategies that require advanced analysis of the areas that should be consolidated or redesigned. The focus is on work reduction over manpower reduction (Cole, 1995).

Systemic Strategies

This approach focuses on changing the organization's systems, culture and attitudes of employees, not just the size of the workforce, configuration of the structure, or the magnitude of the work. It focuses on systems in two ways. First, on internal systems, values, communication, etc. and on external systems, i.e. the production chain including upstream suppliers and downstream customers. This strategy involves redefining downsizing as a way of life, as an ongoing process, as a basis for continuous improvement instead of a program or target. Downsizing is equated with simplification of all aspects of the organization. Instead of being the first target for elimination, employees are defined as resources to help generate and implement downsizing ideas in other areas. All employees are held accountable for reducing costs and finding improvements. Serving customers, meeting their needs, and exceeding their expectations remain a core goal of downsizing activity, not just size reduction.

This strategy is the most compatible with principles of Total Quality Management (Cole, 1995).

Common Outcomes of Downsizing

Positive:

Downsizing announcements usually lead to positive reactions at least for some surveys. Favorable reactions occurred because of a promise of cost savings, reduced expenses, and increased competitiveness. Stockholders and analysts continue to assume that downsizing produces desirable financial results. But it should be noted that this positive outcome of downsizing ( e.g increase in stock value), does not always occur at least in the short-term. Most of the companies felt they did a good job handling the change process and sufficiently attended to the needs of the remaining employees. Many also thought they did a good job in communicating with employees. However, in open-ended questions, communication was cited again and again as the greatest challenge during reorganization. (Right Associates, 1995).

Negative:

It is said that nearly 68% of all downsizing, restructuring, and reengineering efforts are not very successful (Clark & Koonce, 1995). In many cases, companies that downsized and restructured to become more profitable and efficient have not achieved either. Instead they have experienced tremendous fallout, especially in the areas of decreasing employee productivity and morale, and increasing levels of absenteeism, cynicism, and turnover. A look at the reasons for diminished productivity and morale in downsized organizations reveals a changing corporate machine.

CRITICISM OF DOWNSIZING

While companies frequently implement downsizing plans to increase profitability and productivity, downsizing does not always yield these results. Although critics of downsizing do not rule out the benefits in all cases, they contend that downsizing is over-applied and often used as a quick fix without sufficient planning to bring about long-term benefits. Moreover, downsizing can lead to additional problems, such as poor customer service, low employee morale, and bad employee attitudes. Laying workers off to improve competitiveness often fails to produce the intended results because downsizing can lead to the following unforeseen problems and difficulties:

The loss of highly-skilled and reliable workers and the added expense of finding new workers.

An increase in overtime wages.

A decline in customer service because workers feel they lack job security after layoffs.
Employee attitudes that may change for the worse, possibly leading to tardiness, absenteeism, and reduced productivity.
An increase in the number of lawsuits and disability claims, which tends to occur after downsizing episodes.
Restructuring programs sometimes take years to bear fruit because of ensuing employee confusion and the amount of time it takes for employees to adjust to their new roles and responsibilities.

Instead of laying employees off, critics recommend that companies eliminate jobs only as a last resort; not as a quick fix when profits fail to meet quarterly projections. Suggested alternatives to downsizing include early retirement packages and voluntary severance programs. Furthermore, some analysts suggest that companies can improve their efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness through quality initiatives such as Six Sigma, empowering employees through progressive human resource strategies that encourage employee loyalty and stability, and other such techniques.

Sources:
http://www.enotes.com/management-encyclopedia/downsizing-rightsizing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgate-Palmolive

HRM (Assignment 4)

2009-07-28T23:34:00.001-07:00

Career people find themselves on top of the world when the work they're doing falls under what can be described as their dream job...

As a sweet little angel, I dreamed to be a teacher. That was long ago when I realized that I'd like to be a Lawyer. But when I graduated in High School, I took up BS Accountancy...That time, I really thought of being a successful CPA someday and I once told myself, I will be a CPA Lawyer. I became slave of my far and wide imaginations. I wished to top the board exam. I even imagined myself in a coat and tie, with my car...everything that anybody would like to have in the future!!!! Since I have a very good foundation especially in mathematics, anyone who knows me says that I would be a good engineer or accountant. And that was before, long before when I thought that life is just fair. But for the many times of my life, I felt the pain of the harsh reality. I dreamed! I believed! And suddenly, I was broken. The rest is history...

Enrolling in this Degree is none in my wild imaginations. Being an IT student never crossed in my mind. My choice is Engineering, Accountancy and any course related to business and architecture. But when the wind blows and changed the path that I have taken, I have learned to embrace this course, for I can do nothing to return and just grieve. Hehehe, ng-emote…

Anyway, the main concern here is “how can the university help me achieve what I want to be in the future?” based on my answers in Assignment 2 & Assignment 3. Well, whether I like it or not, this would be my last investment. I am determined to pursue what I have started, again. Be it means that I have to drop more tears. Be it means that I would have to squeeze more and more whatever!! The university, whether we admit it or not, plays a big role in the success of a student in the future. In the first place, a university is the center of excellence. Education is a basic need that colleges and universities have provided. Though the best learning is from our very own experiences, it can’t be denied that going to school is still the best experience that every individual had. Every corner of a school is an eye-opener. Everything that your eyes have laid on teaches many lessons that you yourself will soon to discover. And one more thing, bringing the name of your school is an identity. It’s either an advantage or not, the mere fact is that a school you had will be posted on your person.

In this case, first thing is that I do really have a big respect in this university. I came from a private school, which I really consider as one of the best school I had. In fact, I have now the comparison between public and private schools, especially colleges and universities (So I have the guide na puhon,hehehe). But when I became part of this university, I have discovered its pros and cons. I became a living witness of its weakness and strength.

The university has its set of standards that would push you to strive hard. The mentors had their own style and teaching strategies. One thing is that, most of them are Nosebleed, ika nga! But as an IT student, I would say that the university is lack of IT facilities. Our department doesn’t have its own building. Well, we understand that. But in terms of introducing technology trends, it seems that the university doesn’t see its own vision and doesn’t understand its own mission. A support in IT needs doesn’t satisfy students.

For me, maybe it would be a great help for us students if the university will address our basic needs as an IT student. Like say for instance, the computer laboratories. It should be conducive and student-friendly environment. The computers will have to be in good condition. There should be no limit in using computer laboratories for practice. The implementation of free WiFi in the campus should be realized. Such benefits like these would help the students to improve in such a way. Also, I consider that instructors should have known the current trends inside an industry to relate more on actual jobs than more on theory. We understand that our mentors had their best to sustain our learning needs. Next is, there should be a library that would parade latest computer books for some references. Though we can find lots of information through internets, some still consider readings books (to minimize radiation exposure, hehehe). Another is, we don't have our own classroom right? We just borrowed two at the top floor. At least, these two rooms are pleasant to our senses. (Duha lang gni, pastilan!) It should be given attention that a student needs a friendly learning environment. In addition to that, competitions in several categories related to the course will help to boost the interest of the students to be more participative and give way to the idea of technological innovations that will of course drag the hidden talents and skills of the students out of their shell. And also, establishing seminars or any form of learning experience that will enhance the knowledge of the students will do. These are just few considerations that the university will have to see.

In connection to our assignment, my dream job is very ambitious. I must say that the university in current situation does not sustain our very basic needs as an IT student or I may call it, not enough for us to develop ourselves inside this university. The university’s mission and vision calls for a new system of administering technology. The Institute of Computing is one to be considered as an asset in the university thus, this department should not be taken for granted. As a whole, the university can help me at least, to achieve what I want to be in the future if simple things above should be given a chance and would be done.

Finally, I strongly believe that what you are today is your decision yesterday. Skwela tarong para makahuman….

A GLIMPSE at COMDDAP EXPO

2009-07-11T07:23:00.000-07:00

COMDDAP DAVAO EXPO 2009

COMDDAP stands for: Computer Manufacturers, Distributors, and Dealers Association of the Philippines

What is COMDDAP all about?

COMDDAP is an association of the country's top information technology businesses. Its primary objective is to promote the sustainable development of the of the country's information technology industry through voluntary collaboration of its member companies. It is the goal of COMDDAP to be able to provide its members general views and updates from different sectors - private and government, and highly regarded individuals to further uplift the morale and knowledge of its organization.
The vision of promoting and elevating the standards of Information technology (IT) in the Philippines fueled a group of prominent computer companies to form the Computer Distributors and Dealers Association of the Philippines or COMDDAP. Its initial member-companies represent the world's leading makers and providers of computer products, solutions and peripherals.
In 1997, the manufacturing sector - represented by industry leaders Hewlett Packard, Epson and Compaq, among others - was integrated into the COMDDAP membership, making the association a more diverse representation of the IT sector and thus the new name, COMPUTER MANUFACTURERS, DISTRIBUTORS AND DEALERS ASSOCIATION OF THE PHILIPPINES.

http://www.comddap.org/aboutus.htm

The Seminar

July 02, 2009 marks the two-day exhibit visit of the IT sectors at the Apo View Hotel here in Davao. And as an IT student, we are told to attend the seminars conducted by the Nexus Group as what I have seen on the screen.
The exhibit composed of different technology products such as latest phenomenal gadgets, computer stuffs and different kind of technology. Anyway, I haven’t spent much time on roaming around to examine those displayed things but I have attended seminar on four different topics.

Here are the interesting topics that we were able to attend:

Enterprise Resource Information and Control (ERIC-DMS)

Brilliant Dealer Management System

HP Thin Client

Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System

Open Source for Business Applications

1. ERIC-DMS

Presented by Mr. Celmer L. Santos from Jupiter Systems, Incorporated. He talked much on Brilliant Dealer Management System that widely used by Car Businesses. Anyway, Jupiter Systems, Inc. is a 24- year old software company and one of the members of the ERP systems of the Philippines. Their clients include Mitsubishi, Honda, Mazda, Volvo, and Nissan. Their Database Management Systems flow starts with the pre-sales, then vehicle sales and last is the after sales.

The Jupiter Systems’ has also Service Management General Features which are the following:

Advance bookings or Customer appointments

Operation maintenance or FLAT rates

Repair orders

Repair Estimates

Customer Service

History Technician

Time-in or Time-out

Parts requisitioning and picking

Service invoicing

Warranty claims and processing

Field Service Actions (Campaigns)

2.HP Company

(The Thin Client)

Presented by Leonard Zapa, Market Deveopment Manager of HP Company. He started with talking about Linux, CE, and XPe.

He also mentioned the following topics:

Data security, reliability, easier
Management
Remote PC alternatives
Virtualization
Lower TCO
Broadband and related

(Challenge for IT Professionals)

Provide information securit
yDeployment and maintenance
Total cost of ownership (TCO)

He also introduced the widely used HP Thin Client. This is a computing device without a hard drive and can be used independently.

Here some of its features:

- Enhanced security
- Easy manageability
- High reliability
- Environment – friendly
- Lower overall costs

Also he sites its advantages over the usual PC power system:

- Hardened embedded OS
- Free Management Tools
- ¼ failure rate, 10x higher MTBF
- 10x higher MTBF
- Longer life
- ONSITE, Whole unit replacement
- Up to 80% lower power
- Space saving
- Reduced (by 75%) foam and board (by 40%) packaging
- Minimal heat
- Lower initial hardware

Well I guess, the audience are more alive when the discussions was about to end. Why not? The speaker had given tokens for those who can answer their questions. 2-Gig Flash drives, t-shirts and the most exciting is the last token which is an 8-Gig USB. Wow! Usepians got most of the token.

3. Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System

I could remember that the speaker had mentioned that one of the clients of this system is Petron.

RMS Key Features:

Inventory control and tracking
Purchase orders.
Pricing, sales, and promotions
Sales TrackingPowerful, flexible reports

Key Benefits:

Streamline operations
Improve profit margins
Build customer loyalty
Manage business, not technology
Have a life outside your business

4.Open Source for Business Applications of the Spinweb Productions, Incorporated

The speaker asked the audience particularly those who are employed of their definition about Open source. Some shared the following understanding: source code, free, open, contributor, no license, etc.

As the discussions go deeper, it was cleared that Open Source has license but only that it is free. Unlike any other proprietary software you have to pay the licenses that are obviously expensive.

Also the speaker talks about the benefits of using Open Source over Proprietary soft wares applications.
Reliablewidely usedhighly scalableproven performance

Some of the sites that were given are:

lullabot.com
joomlapolis.com
joomla.org.ph
openwp.org.

Some of Open Source Software:Ubuntu
GIMPOpen office
PHPOS commerce
MySqlMozilla
DrupalWHY we have to use Open Source Software?• No vendor Locking• Large Support• More Secure

Evaluation:

Well obviously, it’s another experience that would add up our learning. Seeing different kinds of new technology trends, and experiencing to know more about it must be another thing. As an IT student and a future IT professional, it is an opportunity to expose ourselves in the current trends of the growing technology. It is a challenge for us to be more aware of the world that we are going to travel in the near future. The fast changing IT environment challenged us to go deeper in our chosen field. Also, it was so nice to meet those people who shares their experiences and who promote their respective career. And before I forgot, I was stuck with the conversation, I mean when (Jaime?) intervene the discussions and talks the automated election issue. He shares that the said electoral reform with regards to software’s do not guarantee best performance yet when talks about software, he suggested that many things have to be considered before choosing either open source or proprietary.

THE END…

MIS (Assignment 3)

2009-07-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

AUTOMATED ELECTION REVIEWS

Overview During election times and winning candidates has been announced, those who have seriously doubted the wisdom of participating in the voting exercise would say that many candidates win because of shameless cheating in the polls. Many wished to witness honest elections where there will be no flying voters, which their votes will be counted, and there would be no dagdag-bawas (adding and dropping votes). That would be realized soon starting with the 2010 polls. And that’s on account of the passage of RA 9369, or the Amended Elections Automation Law.

What is automated election?

Election automation refers to the use of computing technology to help conduct elections. The Filipino people nationwide and abroad have been looking forward to the upcoming National Election to be held by the year 2010 (definitely next year). Elections are especially important as indicators of civic virtue. We can see those early political advertisements in our television; we can hear those usual promises in radios and even read political issues on the newspapers. The media had been set an eye to the hottest issues surrounded by the planned of having an automated election.

Security Issues

The Filipinos believed that automation can help to reduce or eliminate corruption. We agree that election automation technology is workable and key to electoral reform. Others say that it’s nearly impossible to cheat using computerized vote-counting machines unlike having a manual election where cheating can be easily committed. Also, it has been demonstrated in other democratic electoral systems that automation reduces opportunities for cheating because of less human intervention based on the experience of other election count systems, automation can eliminate fraud in reading the ballot, recording the precinct results and consolidating the municipal and provincial tallies or total. The claim that poll automation can either eliminate or substantially reduce incidents of election manipulation is based on the notion that reducing the degree of human contact with the voting process reduces fraud. Faster election returns are another attribute commonly associated with election automation.. However, that automation reduces human contact with the voting process is a dubious assumption. The labor required creating, installing, maintaining, and repair, if necessary, the required software and hardware is not factored into these calculations, yet these activities constitute significant human intervention, and therefore opportunities for fraud. Thus, creating speculations that automated election would be impossible.

The Winning Bidder

THE COMMISSION on Elections (Comelec) en banc, through a resolution, has awarded the election automation contract to Total Information Management (TIM)/Smartmatic, finally ending speculation that next year’s polls would again be held via the fraud-prone manual method.
Smartmatic’s bid was P7.2 billion for 82,000 machines covering 80 precincts nationwide — reduced from 200,000 due to the "clustering" of precincts — that would service about 45 million voters as of last count during the 2007 midterm elections But a bombshell was dropped when the local partner, Total Information Management Corp (TIM), announced its withdrawal from its partnership with Smartmatic International Inc. They are pulling out of the P11.3-billion project. Due to the withdrawal, the possibility of a manual election increased further, as Smartmatic will not have any local partner in handling the project.

Comelec Disappointments

The poll chief said it is frustrating to know that TIM is seemingly putting “personal interest” ahead of a matter of national importance. Melo asserted that the Comelec would not allow TIM to walk away easily. Melo said they are set to look at the names behind TIM to see if these people may have been influenced by groups who are against automated elections. The Netherlands-based Smartmatic, meanwhile, remains hopeful that things will be resolved with their former partner. TIM officials have refused to comment despite repeated requests and attempts by Comelec-based reporters. (S. Fabunan)

Settlement has announced

It’s all about tokenism. The 60-40 joint venture basis in favor of TIM and the 90-10 working contribution. Became an issue. But basically the problem goes with the 60-40 issue. That was basically the problem we had. But everything had been discussed and it goes fine now according to Jose Mari Antuñez, head of local IT provider Total Information Management Corp. Before the two companies reconciled on Friday to undertake the P7.2 billion project for the Commission on Elections (Comelec), Smartmatic and TIM were squabbling over “risks and liabilities”—both financially and criminally, putting the program in jeopardy. But Smartmatic and TIM officials told the Senate that that they had patched up their differences and that they had agreed to a “neutral arbiter”—a Singaporean arbitration court—that would help resolve their conflict should they have another conflict.

Blown out of proportion

During the hearing, Melo rebuked Antuñez after the TIM president initially denied that TIM had pulled out from the project and that the issue had been “blown out of proportion.” Melo said that Antuñez went to him last week to tell him that “we have lost trust and confidence (with Smartmatic) and we’re withdrawing.” But Melo said he told Antuñez to fix the problem with Smartmatic and not go to him so he could be their “judge.” On questioning by Sen. Pia Cayetano, Antuñez admitted that his group and Smartmatic had “differences on risk and liability concerns” that were both “financial and criminal.” “But we have reconciled,” Antuñez said.

Token partner

It is prompted that TIM was just a “token partner.” And everything was all about tokenism. That everyone was just fooling themselves in the 60-40 percent venture when the fact is it’s not.

Conclusion:

The discourse surrounding automated elections clearly links technology to the empowerment of civil society. The claims made for poll automation suggest that it represents a solution for the Philippines’ perennial electoral problem — cheating — that, if implemented, would ensure that all votes are counted quickly and accurately. Yet while civil society is championed by technology in this account, the nature of the link between the two is such that civil society is effectively constrained in ways beneficial to the ruling class. Election automation acknowledges, and to a certain extent, addresses the concern of the middle class to develop a positive national identity, but it not does address the economic disparity that underwrites much of the fraud taking place at election time and which, in order to be overcome, would require a radical adjustment in the expectations of the ruling class. While we believed it would be the best solution, thus, making election automation our better hope to have a better electoral reform. AJA!!!!

References:
http://bayan-natin.blogspot.com/2009/06/philippines-2010-automated-election.html http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1960/01/Hegemonic_work_of_automated_election_technology__final_.pdf http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20090707-214221/Smartmatic-TIM-assure-Senate-problem-settled

HRM (Assignment 1)

2009-07-07T02:53:00.000-07:00

HRM (Assignment 1)

Experience can be described as the best way of learning. Definitely! We’ve learned much on our experiences. There are many things that we can never find in the four corners of our house and classrooms. This is what we are practicing in our two subjects this semester. Explore outside the class with regards to Human Resource Management and Management Information System, we are going to update ourselves from posted information through sites online.

In this connection, our first assignment in both subjects is to look for local organizations and discus their best practices in their MIS and HRM Department. We have to propose companies and wait the approval of our professor before we can conduct an ambush interview in their department. Luckily, my proposed company has been approved last July 3, 2009. For the HRM requirement, I have chosen the ANSUICO, Inc. (Red Bull Express) as my proponent.

HISTORY

Our trucking company started in 1953 when IRINEO S. ANSALDO and his brother in-law PEDRO C. SUICO bought the first truck with a price of one peso (Php 1.00) to Smith Bell & Co. Ltd, which was their former employer. The truck was partially damaged by a fire and it was being rebuilt and completed with conglomeration of American and Japanese parts assembly. Our first client was the former owner of the truck itself (Smith Bell & Co., Ltd) at Daliao, Toril, Davao City.

Barely a year we acquired the third unit a heavier capacity model which was equipped with a Buda Diesel Engine (which was later replaced with Cummins Engine). With only one unit delegated to Coca-Cola Bottling to deliver their products to Cotabato area, we observed that our operation was not to be as promising, than if we operate more bigger units. A decision was made to acquire those Army surplus International K-11 model prime movers and semi-hi-bed trailers.

At present, we are operating with more than 100 prime movers, more than 150 reefer vans, more than 200 chassis, more than 100 generator sets and other heavy equipment.

We are serving all major exporters of bananas and pineapples here in Mindanao. Some of our major customers we are currently serving are; American President Lines, California Manufacturing Corp., Ching Bee Trading Corp., Dateline Cargo Express International, Inc., Davao Agricultural Ventures Corp., Davao Central Chemical Corp., Davao Corrugated Carton Corporation, Davao Light and Power Co. Inc., Del Monte Fresh Produce, Inc. Del Monte Philippines, Franklin Baker Co. of the Philippines, Global Fruits Corporation, Maersk-Sealand Filipinas, Inc., Marsman Drydale Corporation, Metro Combine Logistics, Mt. Kitanglad Agri-Development Corp., Mt. Kitanglad Agri-Ventures, Inc., National Power Corporation, National Transmission Corp. (Transco), Nestle Philippines, Unifrutti Philippines, Inc., Uniliver Philippines (PRC), Inc., and others.

With over 50 years in the business, you can count ANSUICO on its specialized driver, the right equipment and safe, timely truck arrivals. We can move anytime just about anything, heavy lift equipments, fruits for export, imported goods and more because we own our trailers, reefers and trucks, in the quantities that meets our customers’ requirements.

Our support staff is empowered with complete knowledge of the trucking industry.

ANSUICO, INCORPORATED is a family owned business with reputation and a corporate priority for a high quality service. OUR VISION

ANSUICO, Inc. continues on with its efforts to be the leading logistics provider to key companies in the Philippines who value and afford high quality and innovative services. OUR MISSION Ansuico, Inc.'s founding principle is based on assisting clients and business partners in achieving their service and profit goals by rendering efficient logistics, characterized by a defined economic edge through prompt, safe and reliable services.

This is achieved by utilizing the full effectiveness of its organization, equipment and transport units, expertise and experience, financial and other resources.

During the interview last July 06, 2009, the HR officer-in-charge wasn’t able to entertain our presence due to busy schedules. Anyway, it was mentioned that the personnel manager newly resigned last month. The one who accommodate our concerns was their school administrator. Ops! What’s the connection? He is one of the arms of the HR Department since Training Department is connected to Human Resource. He’s the one who handles the trainings for the future employees of the company. He mentioned about the trainings that the company itself has to provide with their employees. The company has been practicing in house development. Since ANSUICO, Inc. is more on trucking services, the company provides trainings to their truck drivers, 6 months training in driving lessons, preventive maintenance and etc. to ensure that drivers are well-equipped when they’ll be put into the field.

1.) What are the best practices in Human Resource (HR) management in their company?

They’re living on the International Standard Organization (ISO) principles called 5 S in their daily routine according to the interviewee.

THE 5 S practice:

a.) Sorting of Materials
Each has to make sure those materials needed have been prepared.

b.)Systematized
They must have a good system regarding to their work.

c.) Sanitized
They truly practice to be more clean and neat people inside their company.

d.) Self-discipline
Their employee must have self-discipline to themselves regarding this 5 S daily routine.

e.) Swift

2.) What are the advantages of their Human Resource management in the company?

They provide trainings for their employees to make sure they would be well-equipped when put into their respective fields. Like say for example, their truck drivers. As I’ve mentioned above, the company provides 6 months training in driving lessons and preventive maintenance.

3.) What are the disadvantages?

The disadvantage is that the practical reality. Some of well-trained men would simply go out to seek another pasture instead of staying in Ansuico, Inc. because according to the interviewee, not to flaunt, but men coming from their ground are very much welcome to other company who rendered like their services.

4.) Do you think, you won't come this far without this Human Resource (HR) department?

It was answered that having a Human Resource (HR) department in the company is a big advantage to meet their goals. It simply means that it is important to have a Human Resource (HR) department in the company.

Those are the main questions that we are able to ask during the interview. Though we weren't able to discuss it with the main concern but we have learned a lot of their HR practices. And we are very thankful for their kindness to accept our presence and of answering our questions.

http://www.ansuico.com/[url=http://www.ansuico.com/]

MIS (Assignment 2)

2009-07-07T02:44:00.000-07:00

------MIS (Assignment 2)------

EMCOR

EMCOR is a 100% Filipino-owned retail Business Corporation specializing in appliances, furniture, IT products, motorcycles, and money transfer through its network of specialty chain stores in the Visayas, Mindanao, and Palawan areas. With the launching of our online store, EMCOR will now be making its presence known in the online industry and promote its company’s goals and vision to the global community.

What are the Risks associated with Business and IT/IS change at EMCOR? This is the question for the second assignment that we have to relate in our first one for us to give an answer. Anyway, we have thrown a lot of question during our interview with the EMCOR’s MIS/EDP head. And to recall, here are the few facts that we have gathered during the meeting:

Below are the formulated questions regarding the Management Information System (MIS) of the company’s MIS/EDP that was entertained by the personnel manager himself. He was trained in Digital Interface about programming during his early years in the company and was the first user of the computer in their company.

1.) What are the best practices in Management Information System (MIS) in their company?

According to the interviewee, it is hard to point out if what are the best practices that their department has done to attain their goals but he tries to consider some of their practices that he believes would be best. Like those having back-ups of data in case of unexpected disaster that they might encounter. They have a data security that secures all the data. And also having enough programmers and system analyst who are responsible to control, update, and checked whatever errors that might occurs. They have a Disaster Recovery Procedure that will immediately recover the data in any case that the server might have encounter problems.

Security of the data. EMCOR ensure that there data is secure. They give assurance that their data provides a sense of protection against loss, attack, or harm and precautions taken to keep somebody or something safe from crime, attack, or danger.

Daily Backup. There database provides a copy of computer data that is stored, e.g. a copy stored on a floppy disk, compact disk or any writable materials. In case of shutdown, the company has supported data.

Kept the Data Controlled. Kept the data in check and not expressed fully or at all.

2.) What are the advantages of their Management Information System (MIS) in the company?

Since the company has been using VPN (Virtual Private Network) connections, there is an accurate and fast transferring of data from one store to another and also, since it is private, it is not prone to hacking and stealing of important data. Also it reduces cost and it saves time since transactions will happened too fast than usual.

3.) What are the disadvantages?

One disadvantage is the incorrect data uploading and this would happen usually in system migration. Anyway it’s not really a big problem since they are looking for solutions to possible errors.

4.) Do you think, you won't come this far without this Management Information System (MIS)?

The interviewee says that even without technology, MIS would still exist though not as easy and reliable as of this time. There would still be an MIS, maybe dealing with manual system. But having the opportunity to take advantage of the fast growing technology, MIS also evolves into a more accurate and fast applications that helps the MIS department to achieve its goals with the use of high level techniques and implementations.

5.) How and when did the MIS implemented?

EMCOR started its service along 1985. During the year 1987, they were using only one computer to process transactions. (word star and lotus) until they had a contract with Digital Interface where the interviewee was trained. It started then that they hired programmers and system analyst to support their new way of system.

6.)How does the company’s system developed?

The system was developed along 1997 and 1999 in the preparation of the problem met in 2000. The Y2K problem means on how to input the years 2000 and the succeeding ones.

Along 1998, EMCOR is already internet connected. However, their system is not yet online and decentralized but they are planning to materialize the centralized. In a centralized system, one branch can view the business transaction of the other. The customer can also pay their account in the other branches without the tedious process and hassles in part of the accounting personnel. He also mentioned that each stores has its own databases.

7.) What is the company’s approach in Systems building?

The company is developing its system in house or source out. They were also practicing to develop their own system or trying to improve the existing one. And also considering source out and ready made programs.

MIS Department consists of help desk, research and development and the technical. Help desk answers queries, checks transactions, etc. Research and development is responsible for the systems development. Technical is for the hardware failures.

8.) How is it maintained?

It is maintained by their programmers and systems analyst through users, manager’s approval, reports, encoding and debugging processes and others.

In Mindanao, EMCOR branches and stores are connected via internet except Tandag and Ilungos somewhere in Leyte. However, the two have their own servers and reports would be sent through hard disk.

What are the risks in IT/IS change?

The risks to be considered are the possible data loss, disaster and back down, preparation on the errors of the system, the establishment of the accuracy, and the users acceptance on the system. Also some of the difficulties at risk are the possible discrepancies, training time and etc.

To give a technical background, EMCOR started to use a manual operation in the early years. It was during the year 1997 that the systems was started to develop. Before the year 2000 took its final fold, they were able to implement the Clipper 87 software for the receivables and inventory. It was then that they realized that the problem on the coming of Y2K could affect their system. Later, they were able to migrate another system with the FoxPRo as their front-end and SQL as their back-end. They’re using MS Windows environment. Hopefully, the long-planned migration to another system would be realized by the end of this year or earlier. It will be a SAP package (I forgot to ask what does it stands for) that includes Sales and Collection Monitoring System that will have to centralize their database in order to render best services to their clientele. Also, they are planning to establish a disaster recovery site that would deal all the transactions taken in case of unintentional shutdown and data loss.

References:
http://emcor.com.ph/about.php[/justify]

MIS (Assignment 1)

2009-07-06T23:38:00.000-07:00

In this connection, our first assignment in both subjects is to look for local organizations and discus their best practices in their MIS and HRM Department. We have to propose companies and wait the approval of our professor before we can conduct an ambush interview in their department. Luckily, my proposed company has been approved last July 3, 2009. For the MIS requirement, I have chosen EMCOR Incorporated as my proponent. This will tackle on their best practices in Management Information System (MIS) and the risks associated with business and IS/IT change. But before going down to our discussions, let me give you a brief introduction about EMCOR Incorporated.

EMCOR

EMCOR is a 100% Filipino-owned retail Business Corporation specializing in appliances, furniture, IT products, motorcycles, and money transfer through its network of specialty chain stores in the Visayas, Mindanao, and Palawan areas. With the launching of our online store, EMCOR will now be making its presence known in the online industry and promote its company’s goals and vision to the global community.

EMCOR was founded by JESUS V. del ROSARIO in 1958 and we are currently under the JVR Foundation Inc.—one of the many companies of the JVR Group of Companies. Others include:

• Kawasaki Motors (Philippines) Corporation
• K-Servico Trade, Incorporated
• Wodel Incorporated
• Delsa Chemicals and Multi Products Incorporated
• International Wiring Systems Philippines Corporation
• Hecny Forwarders Incorporated
• Wodel Manpower Services

We carry a wide array of product lines like Panasonic, JVC, Philips, Sony, Sharp, Samsung, Electrolux, La Germania, Whirlpool, FS Furniture, Sanyo, Canon, Brother, Epson, Toshiba, Acer, Kawasaki, Honda, Suzuki and many others. We have also partnered with Western Union for our money transfer services. The core of our existence is our ability to provide high quality service to our customers by providing the right products at the right time, in the right place and at the right price.

We believe that as responsible members of our society, we at EMCOR should pursue our profit objectives in the spirit of service to the community. We believe in reconciling the profit motive of our Company with service to the nation. Thus, we strive to maintain a balance between the interests of our customers, employees, shareholders and the government by supporting national and local agenda for economic development, social reform, educational/scientific research, healthcare and environmental sanitation and preservation. To date, the JVR Foundation has given more than PhP200 Million in philanthropic work.

SERVICES:

1.) Motorcycle Repair

2.) Airconditioning Cleaning

3.) Appliance Repair

4.) Customer Inquiries

Source: http://www.emcor.com.ph/about.php

To give a technical background, EMCOR started to use a manual operation in the early years. It was during the year 1997 that the systems was started to develop. Before the year 2000 took its final fold, they were able to implement the Clipper 87 software for the receivables and inventory. It was then that they realized that the problem on the coming of Y2K could affect their system. Later, they were able to migrate another system with the FoxPRo as their front-end and SQL as their back-end. They’re using MS Windows environment. Hopefully, the long-planned migration to another system would be realized by the end of this year or earlier. It will be a SAP package (I forgot to ask what does it stands for) that includes Sales and Collection Monitoring System that will have to centralize their database in order to render best services to their clientele. Also, they are planning to establish a disaster recovery site that would deal all the transactions taken in case of unintentional shutdown and data loss.

Below are the formulated questions regarding the Management Information System (MIS) of the company’s MIS/EDP that was entertained by the personnel manager himself. He was trained in Digital Interface about programming during his early years in the company and was the first user of the computer in their company.

1.) What are the best practices in Management Information System (MIS) in their company?

According to the interviewee, it is hard to point out if what are the best practices that their department has done to attain their goals but he tries to consider some of their practices that he believes would be best. Like those having back-ups of data in case of unexpected disaster that they might encounter. They have a data security that secures all the data. And also having enough programmers and system analyst who are responsible to control, update, and checked whatever errors that might occurs. They have a Disaster Recovery Procedure that will immediately recover the data in any case that the server might have encounter problems.

2.) What are the advantages of their Management Information System (MIS) in the company?

Since the company has been using VPN (Virtual Private Network) connections, there is an accurate and fast transferring of data from one store to another and also, since it is private, it is not prone to hacking and stealing of important data. Also it reduces cost and it saves time since transactions will happened too fast than usual.

3.) What are the disadvantages?

One disadvantage is the incorrect data uploading and this would happen usually in system migration. Anyway it’s not really a big problem since they are looking for solutions to possible errors.

4.) Do you think, you won't come this far without this Management Information System (MIS)?

The interviewee says that even without technology, MIS would still exist though not as easy and reliable as of this time. There would still be an MIS, maybe dealing with manual system. But having the opportunity to take advantage of the fast growing technology, MIS also evolves into a more accurate and fast applications that helps the MIS department to achieve its goals with the use of high level techniques and implementations.
The said meeting with the Personnel Manager (as he was quoted yesterday and take note, at EMCOR’s conference room?hehehe...palangga gid!) ended with photo shots. Also, we are allowed to see their IBM X3950 hardware which serves as their server. It’s a large machine connected with other three small computers (serves as a back-ups). It looks like a large Power system case.

HRM (Assignment 3)

2009-07-06T03:09:00.000-07:00

EVALUATES ON-LINE JOB SERVICES

1. TUTORS ONLINE

Tutors Online was first launched in 1997. At the time many people wondered if tutoring through the internet wasn't just a service to do homework for you. However, experience has shown that effective tutoring is more about the people than the medium. In the following years there have been technology advances that also make the medium more effective. These include a host of net conferencing options via webcams that make tutoring through the net little different than in person.

Online tutors work for internet based companies that offer help, within a variety of subject areas, to students of all ages. Many online tutor positions offer flexible hours. Most companies require a college education, teaching experience, and/or knowledge in the subject area they will be tutoring.

http://www.school-tutor.com/

http://jobsearch.about.com/od/workfromhome/g/onlinetutor.htm

Evaluation:

Online tutorials help a lot especially to students who were not patient enough to go to the library and look for an answer to their questions. There are lots of sites who offers free tutorials and its up to you to choose where would you like to get answers. Also, you can have online tutors at your most convenient time. And based in my experienced, I have learned a lot from it without hassles.

****************************************************************************************************************************************

2. WEB BUILDING TUTORIAL

Every Web developer has to know the building blocks of the Web .Web Building Tutorial tells you how to build a professional web site. It also shows how you can prepare your web site for the future with new technologies, like XHTML and XML. Designing Web sites needs careful thinking and a lot of planning. The most important thing is to KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. http://www.w3schools.com/Site/site_design.asp

Evaluation:

The process of building your website differs depending on which website building tool you use, however, in general these are the steps to building a website:
Website Building Tutorial Menu
Overview: Components of a successful website
Step1: determine the website's niche
Step 2: Choose website building tool
Step 3: Hosting Server - decide on where you are going to host the site
Step 4: Buy domain name
Step 5: Plan the site
Step 6: Design the layout
Step 7: Convert the layout into an HTML template
Step 8: Create the pages as per the site plan
Step 9: Install any additional scripts on the server
Step 10: Link the pages
Step 11: FTP the files to the hosting server
Step 12: Submit to search engines and promote the site
Step 13: Website Monetization
Step 14: Maintain the site

http://www.vineyardesigns.com/resources/build_website/index.shtml

**************************************************************************************

3. ONLINE WRITING JOBS

Are you having too much fun in the sun? Well, come on inside and get behind your computer! Online writing job includes many categories like magazine, resume, copywriting, website and many more. You don’t need to travel from your house to your office but all you have to do is to sit down and write your article through your computer and earned extra money from it.

Many people have a talent for writing, but finding a way to get paid for your talents can be the most difficult part. Not anymore, there are sites who wants to pay you for your writing skills and talents! Looking for Professional writers, students, retirees and freelancers whose passion is writing. And looking for writers who want to earn a highly competitive compensation, and receive regular payments doing what they enjoy.

Join a worldwide team of professionals and earn a competitive salary using your writing skills and abilities! You can choose either to work at home as a freelance writer or in our office located in The Philippines.

http://www.writers.ph/

**************************************************************************************

4. MEDICAL TRANSCRIPTION

Medical transcription, also known as MT, is an allied health profession, which deals in the process of transcription, or converting voice-recorded reports as dictated by physicians and/or other healthcare professionals, into text format.

The term transcript or "report" as it is more commonly called, is used as the name of the document (electronic or physical hard copy) which results from the medical transcription process, normally in reference to the healthcare professional's specific encounter with a patient on a specific date of service. This report is referred to by many as a "medical record". Each specific transcribed record or report, with its own specific date of service, is then merged and becomes part of the larger patient record commonly known as the patient's medical history. This record is often called the patient's chart in a hospital setting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_transcription

****************************************************************************

5. ONLINE TYPING JOBS

A highly searched for opportunity is Online typing jobs from home. This is the easiest kind of job you can do, especially if you enjoy typing and have a computer with internet access. In todays plummeting economy, typing from home is an easy way to earn some extra cash for those bills that still have to be paid! There are several ways you can earn money online typing jobs from home. You can become a freelance writer and pretty much write your own check, or you can get paid to do data entry for other online companies. It all depends on whether you want to work for yourself or someone else. Either way, typing jobs online and data entry jobs from home are a good choice to earn some extra income.

http://garycortez.com/online-typing-jobs-from-home-can-you-really-make-money-typing-at-home/

**************************************************************************************

HRM (Assignment 2)

2009-07-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

Thinking twice about a career in the FUTURE?

I.T. is everywhere. Every industry, from marketing to engineering uses I.T... Most large companies have their own in house I.T. department, as do governments, and even some NGO’s. And being an IT student, thinking about my future job is one of my concerns. Anyway, I got the idea on what would be the right term of my possible job in the near future through surfing the net on the hot jobs for the IT graduates. I have read a lot IT jobs, their descriptions, their qualifications, the salary ranges and many more. But before I have decided to choose a job for me, I first examine myself. The possible things that I can do in the future and the interest I had in mind. Well, I’m not really good at something. I can say that I’m an average person. I don’t have a particular field. But the good thing in me is that I can learn fast. And I have the confidence of honesty, hard work, perseverance and I can handle responsibility at some point. Hehehe.

Well, born to be an ambitious gal, I would like to be held responsible for the design, development, modification, programming and implementation of software applications, databases, enterprise reporting and analysis solutions. I would like also doing the blueprint for a design which ultimately will get physically built on a machine. Being the one who performed the initial design work that enables production systems and applications to use data and drive business processes, I would like to maintain an operating systems, business applications, mid-range server hardware, local and wide area network hardware and software, security tools, Web servers, e-mail systems and PCs. I would like to handle all aspects of IT security, like securing Wi-Fi networks, handling offsite storage of backup tapes, establishing policies for lost laptops and much more creating and implementing corporate IT security practices and ensuring that employees follow those procedures. I would like to play a lead role in small scale IS projects and an active role in large scale projects and will provide support to other IS staff when necessary. I would like also to be the one who oversee the process and methodology that is in place, identify best practices to ensure a successful project.

Wow! What a wonderful feeling to think of the future is in my hand. Putting my self in one of those prestigious jobs that I have read in the internet is like heaven. But anyway, it’s not impossible if God permits. We just don’t know I would be a Project Manager, System Administrator, Data modeler, Applications Architect, Software analyst, IT Security Manager etc. We can’t really tell. Maybe one of these coming years, I’ll be managing my own business. Or I’ll be working in one of the biggest and famous company outside or inside the country. Or I’ll bring the name of famous innovations in a fast growing world of technology. I would simply want to develop something that would bear my name. Would it be in games, web, anything that would help the progress of the society. Or maybe I became a plain house wife and just taking care with my future family. Whatever may happen will be twin with good lucks, and God’s grace.

http://www.cio.com/article/101314/The_Hottest_Jobs_In_Information_Technology

MIS (Assignment 4)

2009-06-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

What is green computing?

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_computing Green computing is the study and practice of using computing resources efficiently. The primary objective of such a program is to account for the triple bottom line, an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measuring organizational (and societal) success. The goals are similar to green chemistry; reduce the use of hazardous materials, maximize energy efficiency during the product's lifetime, and promote recyclables or biodegradability of defunct products and factory waste.

Modern IT systems rely upon a complicated mix of people, networks and hardware; as such, a green computing initiative must be systemic in nature, and address increasingly sophisticated problems. Elements of such a solution may comprise items such as end user satisfaction, management restructuring, regulatory compliance, disposal of electronic waste, telecommuting, virtualization of server resources, energy use, thin client solutions, and return on investment (ROI).

The imperative for companies to take control of their power consumption, for technology and more generally, therefore remains acute. One of the most effective power management tools available in 2009 may still be simple, plain, common sense.[1]

Green Campus

Our nation’s institutions of higher education spend a significant portion of their annual operating budgets on utility services, diverting funds from valuable programmatic and community-building activities. The Alliance to Save Energy’s Green Campus Program is leading the way towards campus sustainability by bridging the divide between students and institutional energy costs. Through Green Campus, students are working to save energy on campuses by building general campus awareness, incorporating energy conservation and efficiency into course curricula, and implementing projects targeting energy use, student purchasing decisions, and operational changes.

http://ase.org/content/article/detail/3037

San Diego State Green Campus
by SDSU Greencampus

We are all about advocating energy efficiency and sustainability on campus. We believe in the back to basics approach: Organic living, thinking simple and exploring the rich relationship between people and the community.
Our Purpose
We aim to conserve energy usage and promote sustainability by advocating to students and community about the simple things they can do for the environment.

http://greencampus.winserve.org/greencampus/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=40

Green IT and Green Computing Technology

( Green Technology )

Green IT, also known as Green Computing, is the movement towards a more environmentally friendly and cost-effective use of power and production in technology. The crux of Green IT is to double or triple the bottom line investment costs by converting existing structures and systems to this more conservative mode of operation in green computing. Some common Green computing concepts are Virtualization, Recycling, Telecommuting and Power Management through the use of efficient devices. So help save the environment, save yourself some money and "go green" with green IT computing.

http://www.eweek.com/c/s/Green-IT/

My Opinion...

The university played a big role to push a campaigned for this “green campus computing” program. Many campuses had already imposed and cooperate to establish an eco-friendly environment through saving energy from using computers. My suggestions on how will the university can adopt this concepts are according to what I have read from the many articles and URL’s that promote green computing. First, today would not be too late to participate in this kind of program. The university directors, faculty members, instructors and students must have to cooperate to make this program possible. Those who are in position must imposed green computing in this university down to every colleges and departments. Campaigns should be done and proper notifications should be handled in order to promote the program to the students. Though this would not be achieve in a blink of an eye, at least, constant reminders specially to students who were the constant users must helped to take this practice as a daily routine and as is like breathing. As an IT student, we should be aware of every possible effect that would take place especially that we more knew how advanced technology gave benefits as well as disadvantage to the environment.

2009-06-22T10:32:00.000-07:00

Mintzberg’s 10 Managerial Roles

Management expert Professor Henry Mintzberg has argued that a manager’s work can be boiled down to ten common roles. According to Mintzberg, these roles, or expectations for a manager’s behavior, fall into three categories: informational (managing by information), interpersonal (managing through people), and decisional (managing through action).

Mintzberg’s Managerial Roles

Informational-Monitor.Seek and acquire work-related information.

Ex: Scan/read trade press, periodicals, reports; attend seminars and
training; maintain personal contacts

-Disseminator.Communicate/ disseminate information to others within the organization.

Ex: Send memos and reports; inform staffers and subordinates of decisions

-Spokesperson.Communicate/transmit information to outsiders.

Ex: Pass on memos, reports and informational materials; participate in
conferences/meetings and report progress

Interpersonal-Figurehead.Perform social and legal duties, act as symbolic leader.

Ex: Greet visitors, sign legal documents, attend ribbon cutting ceremonies,
host receptions, etc.

-Leader.Direct and motivate subordinates, select and train employees.

Ex: Includes almost all interactions with subordinates

-Liaison.Establish and maintain contacts within and outside the organization.

Ex: Business correspondence, participation in meetings with representatives
of other divisions or organizations.

Decisional-Entrepreneur.Identify new ideas and initiate improvement projects.

Ex: Implement innovations; Plan for the future

-Disturbance Handler.Deals with disputes or problems and takes corrective action.

Ex: Settle conflicts between subordinates; Choose strategic alternatives;
Overcome crisis situations

-Resource Allocator.Decide where to apply resources.

Ex: Draft and approve of plans, schedules, budgets; Set priorities

In the real world, these roles overlap and a manager must learn to balance them in order to manage effectively. While a manager’s work can be analyzed by these individual roles, in practice they are intermixed and interdependent. According to Mintzberg: “The manager who only communicates or only conceives never gets anything done, while the manager who only ‘does’ ends up doing it all alone.”

http://management.atwork-network.com/2008/04/15/mintzberg%E2%80%99s-10-managerial-roles/

IT/IS Leadership Roles

2009-06-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

In many companies, CIOs struggle against the perception that their job is merely to keep the e-mail flowing. After all, CEOs know immediately when basic services fail but are less aware when investments in new technologies fall short or, even more problematic, when companies aren't making the IT investments they need to refresh their businesses. By structuring and governing different aspects of IT to deliver different goals, companies can be more confident that they are getting the most from their IT investments.

New IT leadership roles

As companies restructure IT to support differentiated roles, IT leaders will need to decide where their strengths lie and which aspect of IT they aspire to manage. In our work with leading companies, we see four roles emerging for CIOs. Each relies on different skills and offers the company a different value proposition.

Head of scale

This role expands on the CIO's traditional responsibility for managing IT infrastructure and enterprise systems, broadening it to include improving efficiency and driving down cost of all commodity business services -- not just IT -- by taking advantage of scale and the potential for outsourcing and offshoring.

At many companies, CIOs in this role also have accountability for shared services or back-office functions (such as finance, procurement, and human resources) and for driving down transaction costs through investments in enterprise- resource-planning (ERP) systems and offshoring.

Executives who thrive on improving efficiency and squeezing costs from IT operations are well suited for this role. Measures of success include reducing transaction costs and the level of working capital by making payment processes more efficient. P&G's Filippo Passerini, for example, standardized processes and established a global shared-services organization that is recognized as best in class.

Business process manager

This role involves focusing on differentiating a company's existing business operations from those of competitors. Increasingly, CIOs in this mode manage not only IT resources but also operations and processes, such as customer service, that are part of the core business.

This approach creates a single point of accountability for improving business processes through automation or more traditional routes and makes it possible to develop new products and services rapidly. Such a leader works closely with business unit leaders to improve business processes for competitive advantage. Robert Carter of FedEx saw opportunities to use IT to integrate the company's logistics services more tightly with the supply chains of its clients, so it wins contracts by virtue of its integral support for their processes.

Chief innovator

IT investments in new business models or innovations that open up new markets call for a focus on experimentation and a willingness to learn from failure. Playing this role requires some distance from a company's current businesses, since innovations occasionally threaten to cannibalize them.

In typical organizations in most industries, the IT leader is less likely to be a chief innovator than a scale or process leader. But when technology innovations can make a big difference, CIOs choosing to play the role of innovator can be extremely valuable. Consider Randy Mott's contributions to the evolution of Dell's business model when he was the company's CIO.

After a long career at Wal-Mart Stores, he applied lessons he learned about supply chain and data warehouse technology to enhance Dell's build-to-order business model that uses better information about the price of components and a more sophisticated customer segmentation to make timely, customized sales offers.

Strategic technology adviser

This role involves coordinating the activity among all three of the areas already listed. It is the role that most current CIOs see themselves playing, but many are so mired in daily operational responsibilities that they have only a limited ability to own and evangelize for the enterprise view associated with each of the preceding roles.

To be truly effective in this one, IT leaders should aspire to board-level status, with strong connections not only across functions within the company but also to external parties in other organizations, including clients and suppliers. At Wal-Mart, Linda Dillman led the retailing industry's adoption of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags by coordinating the efforts of the company's business and functional leaders and of its vast network of suppliers and distributors.

Because each role requires a distinct skill set for success, it's difficult to play all four roles successfully at once. Developing focus takes time, as does earning a record of success in any of these roles. The trends that would push IT leaders into a shared-services support role are likely to increase, so IT leaders should quickly move toward the role where they can add the most value to their companies.

http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/article.php?cat1=1&id=976

REFLECTION/Learnings...

2009-06-22T05:16:00.000-07:00

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
Robert Byrne

My regret was that I wasn’t able to attend the first meeting with our professor Randy S. Gamboa for the MIS class. That was Thursday, June 18, 2009. I was sick that time (not very sick) but was very confident that there was no classes (again) like the past few days where I came to school early than my schedule. If only I knew that our professor for that subject was Mr. Gamboa, I would probably jump out of my bed and went to school though I’m not feeling well. I was very much aware that being absent either late must be a big, big, and big NEVER!!! Unfortunately and honestly, I wasn’t informed very well. Poor me!!! I was just surprised when my classmates asked me why I wasn’t around during the first day discussion knowing that were much afraid to miss the class with Mr. Gamboa. Well, it was too late to mourn and rather to blame myself for what I’ve missed. That’s why all I can do to cope up is seek information on what was happened in that span of hours.

As its usual manner, it was started with a prayer. And since there were new faces coming from USEP-Tagum, there was a short self-introduction. Then the formality of discussions followed.My Gosh! I was horrified to know that were going to make a blog site and have to post three assignments to be checked sooner. I can hear the loud beat of my heart especially when I started to ask what would be the topic to be posted. Nosebleed!!! Added to my horrible feelings was the excitement for the incoming company visits. I thought if how would it be like? Will my confidence boast out when we are going to conduct the Information System Needs Assessment? Will I make it individually? Oh! How I wished it will be a group work. More heads are better than one, hehehe…

I find it really hard to understand their explanations (am referring to my classmates) when I asked them to give me important details that could help me so that I could have something to post for my blog. Though I can’t expect too much detailed stories from them, I still tried to find other ways for me to be able to write something for this reflection. I have read the forums, and through the stories told there, I have given the ideas on what was happened on that meeting and how the discussions were going on.

The course description “Management Information System” was mainly the topic. This three-word course title has been examined. Like what is M.I.S? The class was then asked to define “management” and many students have shared their answers. Mr. Gamboa on the other hand said that management implies that someone or something needs to be managed; he/she or it is not capable of being independent (from Gador). Management comprises planning, organizing, leading or directing, and controlling an organization (a group of one or more people or entities) or effort for the purpose of accomplishing a goal (wikepedia). Mr. Gamboa then asked the class in situation, if we were an employee, would we like to be controlled? Mostly answered YES, at least at first. But the realization came that people cannot be controlled because we have our different characteristics and attitudes, we have our own and unique moods. We are not robotics to be controlled. We are not machines but human who have life, who breathe and who thinks. Well, I was then caught in a deep thought when I knew how interesting the topic was. I remembered during the last summer, when one of our instructor said that it should not be called as “manager” since we can never really managed people but rather we can just “supervised” them. It hit me. Does it mean that supposedly, there would be no such word as “manager” (when refer to a company) but “supervisor” can be? We, people don’t need to be controlled. We don’t stick to what others just said. We were capable to think and decide what would be better. We were capable to lead. Yes, we must be led rather than directed. Mr. Gamboa agrees to that single statement. That is why it was concluded that the right term should be “lead”. Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen (wikepedia). Thus, it also deals with people. As RSG said that leadership and management are two different words (from Soriano) but both handles people. Leadership is one of the most salient aspects of the organizational context. It only differs on how would these two words attained its goals and objectives. On the other hand, generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation (wikipedia). And lastly, in a general sense, the term information system refers to a system of people, data records and activities that process the data and information in an organization, and it includes the organization's manual and automated processes. In a narrow sense, the term information system (or computer-based information system) refers to the specific application software that is used to store data records in a computer system and automates some of the information-processing activities of the organization.

Is Management Information System is the appropriate description for this course? It stunned me. Isn’t it the appropriate one? I was puzzled. As to my stand for the appropriation of the MIS description, yes! Since management information system (MIS) defines as a subset of the overall internal controls of a business covering the application of people, documents, technologies, and procedures by management accountants to solving business problems such as costing a product, service or a business-wide strategy. Management information systems are distinct from regular information systems in that they are used to analyze other information systems applied in operational activities in the organization.[1] Academically, the term is commonly used to refer to the group of information management methods tied to the automation or support of human decision making, e.g. Decision Support Systems, Expert systems, and Executive information systems (wikipedia). It wasn’t affected by the separate meaning of each term. Because as it stated above, it is a subset of the overall internal controls of business. It follows that this MIS is just a term given to the discipline focused on the integration of computer systems with the aims and objectives on an organization.

Finally, the discussions get lightly. And before I forgot, I wasn’t surprised the good news that Mr. Gamboa is now the National President in IT Educators in the Philippines because I do really believe that he would be one of the biggest names and it really happened. USEPians, we must be PROUD!!!

AKO....Kahapon, Ngayon, at Bukas

2008-12-05T14:35:00.000-08:00

Kahapon...Ako'y bunga ng isang tunay na pagmamahalan, buong ingat na inaalagan. Siyam na buwang dala-dala sa sinapupunan. Kinasasabikan, inaasam-asam. Noon yon. Noong akoy isang sanggol pa lamang na iniluwal mula sa sinapupunan ng isang ina. Nakangiti, maliwanag ang mundong aking nasilayan, kasing liwanag nang inaakala kung buhay, unang mulat pa lamang ng aking mga mata.
Dumaan ang mga taon at tinahak ko ang buhay kamusmusan,walang hanagad kundi ang magkaroon ng isang makulay na kabataan. Lumaki akong busog sa pangaral ukol sa tamang daan na tataluntunin sa buhay. kahit di pa gaanong ganap na maintindihan ang mga nangyayari sa paligid, isang bukas na aklat para sa akin ang kahirapang minsa'y humampas sa maliit naming pamilya. Puno ng respeto, paggalang...ngunit nakatakda nga palang dumating ang panahong aapaw rin ang nagbubugsong pagtitimpi. Oo, ako'y isang musmos pa lamang, hindi pa sapat ang lakas upang lumaban ng sabayan sa mga tukso ng buhay, ngunit alam ko, alam ng mura kong puso, at naiintindihan ng bata kong isipan ang mga pagdurusang pinapasan ng aming mga magulang. Naranasan kong maging salat sa materyal na bagay. ngunit iyo'y hindi maging hadlang upang wasakin ang pangarap na hinubog ng isang karanasan. Unti-unti, nabuksan ang mura kong isipan. Nakikita ko ang mga dahilan ng paghihirap ng aking mahal na magulang. Sapat na upang sa batang puso ay uusbong ang galit. noon yon-noong nakasilong pa lamang kami sa madilim na anyo ng buhay.

Ngayon...hanggang ngayon ay masasalamin ko pa rin ang madilim na kabanata ng aming buhay. Ngunit iyo'y unti-ynti ko nang tinalikuran at pilit na kalimutan. Iyo'y magsisilbi na lamang bangungot ng panaginip na naging hamon upang maabot ko ang ngayon. Dahil ngayon ko higit na naiintinhan ang lahat ng mga dahilan., habang hinubog ako ng panahon, ngayon ko higit na natutuhang ganun nga pala talaga ang buhay. Minsan, nadadapa ka. Minsan, inaapakan ka, hindi para tuluyang malugmok kundi para matutunan mong tumayo, lumaban at muling lalakad upang hanapin ang tunay na kahulugan ng buhay. Minsan, masakit isiping kailangan mong mamili ngunit ganun nga pala talaga. Dahil sa ganitong paraan mo lang malalaman ang tamang landas na iyong pupuntahan. Ngayon ko naiintindihan na ang galit na minsa'y umusbong sa mura kong damdamin ay dulot lamang nang imahinasyong naglilikot sa munting pusong nakaranas ng matinding depresyon. Ngayon ko mas hinubog ang determinasyon at tiwala sa sarili at sa Diyos para sa isang naghihintay na bukas.

Bukas...ay ang katuparan ng aking mga pangarap. At sa pagdaloy ng panahon, unti-unting lilitaw ang bagong umaga. At sa aking paggising ay mag-iiba ang mukha ng mundo. Magbabago ang anyo nito at masisilayan ko ang bagong anyo ng buhay kung saan nakangiti ang araw, nagsasayaw ang mga punong kahoy sa hihip ng hanging malamyos na dadampi sa aking mukha upang makibahagi sa tagumpay na aking tinatamasa.

Ang nakaraan ay bahagi ng kasalukuyan. Ngunit hinda hadlang upang maabot ang hinihintay na bukas. Bukas, ang aking hinaharap at maging bahagi na naman sa susunod pang bukas...

Ako ito...Kahapo, Ngayon, at Bukas.........

( Written during the final
grading period. IV-Narra
2005 )