Infrastructure Cloud Services

Executive Summary

The main objective of this report is to critically analyse business requirements from an information systems perspective. Along with this, it is also found that this report also identifies concepts of the information systems and identifies and resolve problems within a business context. In this report, it was found that the current business environment is fully based on the technology.

At the same time the increasing the competition level developed the competition in the business scenario. Due to this, it is difficult for an organisation to make the profit with concerning of the technology and modern techniques of the of business process.

In this, it is found that e- business is a process that allows the organisation to sell their products online business platform. In this research paper, it is also analysed that there is a great role of the effective combination of the hardware and software in the database management system.

Along with this, it is also evaluated that the use of the online platform helps the company to achieve the competitive advantage. But, in order to run the business at online platform, the company should to keep a strong data base system.

At the same time, it is also found that there is a significant benefit of implementing a collaboration system in the business. This system is helpful in the organisation to share the significant information among the employees and management. In the sane concern of this, the organisation should aware about the privacy when embarking on an online presence.

Introduction

This assignment gives the brief understanding about the elements of computer system that are essential for performing the regular activities in the business. Business uses different system for performing their function as system guides the employees, team members regarding the performing of certain task.

So in that case, development of system as per the changing technology is the current necessity of the business. In case of online business, it is necessary for the business to bring the change by installing the effective system that can satisfy the needs of the customers and stakeholders (Al-Debei, 2011).

The installed system should facilitate the proper privacy of personal information with allow easily sharing of information and views among the team members for attaining the targets.

Likewise in this report, the study focuses on providing suggestions to the Dr Smith for implementing the system in their business with the aim to expand in the global market. The study also gives brief about the privacy, knowledge management system, DBMS for assisting the company to grow in future.

Section 1: Hardware, Software and Networking Infrastructure / Cloud Services

The current business environment is fully based on the technology that enables firm to achieve the completive advantage. The online business activities include a lot of the activities and data maintenance like requirements.

In this concern, the data base management system allows companies and management to maintain different kind of data effectively (Baltzan, et al., 2015). A database management system enables firm to store, organise and maintain a big amount of data and information with the help some important hardware and software.

In the provided case study, John Smith wants to develop Whovian Pandorica’s Database Management System (DBMS) utilising Microsoft Access and Decision Support System (DSS) in the organisation.

It will help the company to data access at the workplace. The database management system focuses on the programming language (Al-Debei, 2011). This programming language will requires software. By the help of development the database management system, the company will design organisational system to allow the definition, creation, querying update

The uses of the hardware and software will help the company to shows the content of the business website (Baltzan, et al., 2015). In this, John smith can display data including product, price description and images by the help of software in the database system.

Computer hardware proposal

Hardware name	Feature	Price AUD$
Processor	Pentium 4 or equivalent processor (or higher)	2000
Ram	At least 2 or 4 GB (more recommended)	500
Hard disk capacity	Approx. 1024MB for the installation of ADOxx At least 40 MB for every new (empty) ADOxx database (depends on the DBMS) Plus approx. 400–700 MB for every 1,000 models in a database	1000
Screen	17” or 19”	1500
Printer	A4 sheet printers	2500

Computer software proposal

Operating system	Windows XP Professional Edition (only 32-bit) Windows Server 2003 (32-bit and 64-bit) Windows XP Home Edition (only 32-bit) Windows Vista (32-bit and 64-bit) Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit) Windows 8/8.1 (32-bit and 64-bit) Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit) / 2008 R2 (64-bit only) Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 (64-bit only)
Database management system	Redistributed DBMS (in package): Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2Supported DBMS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2005 Express (Requirements online at Microsoft MSDN) Micsoroft SQL Server 2008/2008 Express (Requirements online at Microsoft MSDN) Microsoft SQL Server 2012/2012 Express (Requirements online at Microsoft MSDN)

Networking and Communication Proposal

In the adoption of the database management system, the network and communication indicate to transmission of the digital data and information between the two systems.

In this, the term used network refers to the network of the computer system that allows the computers to exchanges the data. In the organisation of the John, the communication and network system will be developed according the needs and requirement of the company (Baltzan, et al., 2015).

In this company can choose the different kind of the communication network including local area network, wide area network and metropolitan area network. In this, local area network (LAN) will allow only a small geographic area (Chen, et al. 2012).

By the help of this network, the employees of the company can talk and share the data and information. On the other hand, through the wide area network can help to communicate in the broad range of geographic area.

It will help the company to connect the LAN with the other networks in the environment. Beside of this, metropolitan area network man will is also a network that is used in the communication. It is connected with the LAN in the organisation and WAN in the large geographic area (Cuzzocrea, et al. 2013).

Section 2: Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) is a technology that makes enables the organisation and management access the data and information. It is a helpful technique that is used by the management and decision makers to make decision regarding the growth of the company.

This technique provides the importance and actionable information to the managers and user that enable to take decision with more effectively. Business intelligence includes the wide range of the software, hardware and methodology (Guerra & Andrews, 2011).

The combination of the hardware and software is helpful for the companies to collect the information and data from the internal and external tools.

The business intelligence will allow Dr John Smith to make better decision by accessing big data. The BI is a systematic process that is based on the accurate and timely information which will help Dr John smith to measure the performance of the company (Baltzan, et al., 2015).

BI will also help the John to make informed decisions on the organisational challenges by providing significant information on historical and current performance of the company. It will also helpful for John to know future trends, expected demands, customer behavior etc (Karim, 2011).

The application of the BI in at the work place will ensure that the firm gets the actual time advanced reports to ensure that John can utilise the information to make the better decision in the organisation.

Business use data mining to gain competitive advantage and what type of data mining

The current business environment is very competitive so companies move to various ways that can provide competitive advantage to them. In this, data mining is a computing process that helps the firms to gain the competitive advantage.

It is a process of discovering patterns in large data sets that contains some methods at the, statistics, database systems, intersection of artificial intelligence, and machine learning (Kimball & Caserta, 2011).

There are many business organisations that use the data mining process to achieve the competitive advantage. It provides the competitive advantage to the firms in the terms of the build customer loyalty, unlock hidden avenues for profitability and reduce cline agitation.

In order to get the competitive advantage the companies focuses on the various ways (Baltzan, et al., 2015). In this, basket or affinity analyse is a techniques that is helpful to achieve the competitive advantage. By the help of this way, the company can improve its products and services because it allows the company to get recommendations and suggestion of the customers (Kimball & Ross, 2011).

Sales Forecasting is another way in the data mining to get the competitive advantage. The main aim of this technique is to look at the customer during the purchasing process.

This technique is used to inventory management so the company can fulfil the market demand of the customers (Baltzan, et al., 2015). It provides the competitive advantages to the company. At same time, in the data mining, database marketing is also a way that can also provides the competitive advantage to the firms.

In this technique, firms create the group of the product then sell it in market. It also includes the depth analysis on the customers which benefit company can gain.

Type of the data mining – There are five types of the data mining that are explaining below.

Anomaly detection- This technique is helpful for the companies to identify the unusual data records.

Clustering – Clustering is a process of the collection of the data process objectives. In this process, the collected objectives are similar within the same cluster.

Classification – This technique is help to know about the structure of the new data.

Regression – Regression analysis is a process that is helpful in the measuring and evaluating the relationship among the various variables.

Summarization – This technique provides more solid representation of the data set with including visualization and report generation (Al-Debei, 2011).

On the basis of study of above data mining, it can be said the company should use the summarisation and classification should be use.

Type of business intelligence tools would best suit the businesses current needs

There are different types of BI tools that are used according to needs of the business. he different kind of BI tools are below:

Databases and Data Containers

Databases and Data Containers is one of the most used BI tools in the database table. It can be used in the modern database design. It has some areas for provided record. With the help of this, a firm can develop a reliable data source for all the users (Imeson et al., 2013).

Data Mining Tools

The data mining tools is also a significant tool of the BI that enables the user to take data into and out. The basic process of the data mining basically provides firms the components that they use in functional analytic systems (Mayer, 2013).

Visual Dashboards

Visual dashboard is also a significant tool of the BI. It is designed for companies for with the purpose of enhancing reliability in the process. It is important for the user companies to analyse the data and information.

Reporting Tools

Reporting tool is important to have visualized data, reporting tools do the trick. In this, there is various firms use the reporting tools. The main function of the reporting tool is to provide other sorts of tools including customer relationship management, sales force automation, and more (Guerra & Andrews, 2011).

Geographic Systems

The role of the geographic information systems in BI tools is to make the better utilization of the geolocational information for BI purposes. The main purpose of using this tool is to reuse the visual dashboards and mined data.

Section 3 Collaborations Systems

Collaboration System consider as an information system that is widely used by the companies for properly sharing of documents and knowledge in between the teams, individual in the organisation (Panetto et al., 2016).

The main purpose of designing the collaboration system is to unite the employees, group who are working on the common task so that proper communication can be establish and team able to coordinate and manage the work effectively manner.

At the same time, it also provides various solutions such as video conferencing, project management software and collaborative software (Baltzan, et al., 2015). Thus, the collaboration system can be prove beneficial for the company of Dr John Smith in order to bring new technology that effectively support the operations of the mail order set-up.

Business Benefits with the implementation of collaboration system

The implementation of collaboration system in the business can provides various benefits in the form of developing more efficient processes, making better communication, tapping employees strength and able to make customers more satisfied.

In addition to this, business would also take an advantage of financial benefits, human capital, intellectual capital and many more that are mention below:-

Physical capital: The benefits that can get from the collaboration system by Mr Smith are that collaboration system supports the sharing of facilities, resources, equipments and raw materials (Becerra-Fernandez and Sabherwal, 2014). This allows the workers, employees to share the common resources and equipments for performing the particular task.
Intellectual capital: The intellectual capital of the particular business gets the benefits from the information sharing, involvements in collaborative research and development. Such practices can strengthen the relationship with the partners.
Creation of new Processes: The collaboration of information provides support to the companies in terms of develop new product or process. As collaboration system allows the company to get the knowledge about the changing trends of the market and able to identify its potential customers (Khodakarami and Chan 2014).
Thus this can helps the Mr Smith for determining its target customers and their changing needs & wants.

In addition to this, the business could implement the collaborative system in the case of structured category. In this, business should set the rules, structure and set workflow that will need to be considers by the employees and it would not be change for anyone and written rules guides the team to share the knowledge and perform particular activity in a certain manner (Elhart, et al., 2016).

This will prove to be helpful for guiding the employees to perform in a particular way. In case of unstructured category, business needs to develop the open communication system that does not follow any strict rules and this practice also allow the team members to freely share their views and ideas.

So, the implementation of structured collaboration could provide more advantage to the business in terms of easily bringing of innovation because unstructured framework allows the team members to freely share their ideas in the brainstorming sessions.

Thus for the Mr Smith unstructured collaboration structure is more appropriate as compare to structured collaboration.

Benefits of business with the knowledge management system

The knowledge management system consider as a well organised system that gives advantage to the business in terms of taking fast decision making. As knowledge management system deliver the relevant information to the employees and develop such environment that supports freely exchange of information and making appropriate decision making.

On the other hand, the collaboration system also support the KMS by bringing power of large numbers, collect diverse opinions and varied experiences and this allow the company to take proper business and strategic decisions (Baltzan, et al., 2015).

At the same time, KMS also contributes to quickly spread and communicate information among the partners and employees through personalized portals, targeted subscription, RSS feeds and specialised search engines etc.

Moreover, KMS handles and manages the explicit knowledge as this type of knowledge consider very effective regarding the storing, retrieve and modification of documents.

The explicit knowledge system is the quite essential for the managerial perspective as it helps the people to easily access the information that is require performing certain task and that knowledge is also updated, reviewed on a regular interval (Guerra and Andrews, 2011).

Thus, this type of knowledge is handling by KMS for storing, updating and distributing the information among the team members. Besides that, KMS also manage and handle the tactic and embedded knowledge for communicating the relevant accurate information among the partners and different business entity for increasing the productivity of the company.

Hence for the Mr Smith, the implementation of KMS could be beneficial for them in terms to develop healthy working environment.

Benefits of content management system for the Business

The content management systems provide benefit to business by creating and managing the digital content. It allow the multiple users as in the business many people provide their input into the website like some design the product pages, blog pages so in that case CMS is the one that makes easy to manage multiple roles and allow to publish such content that is relevant and creative so that maximum customers can be attracted (Baltzan, et al., 2015).

CMS also helps the business in making improvement in the site as with the CMS, company can easily maintain the site and make necessary changes in site without breaking the site. Moreover, it also keep update the site automatically (Verma and Voida, 2016). This practice will help the Mr Smith and their company to effectively manage their content and able to provide the update facts to the customers through their content.

For the Mr Smith, the type of content management system that is well suited to them is word press as it is ideal for personal websites, blogs and small businesses as it assist the business in designing the relevant content (Panetto et al., 2016). On the other side, Joomla can also prove that it can be useful for the Mr Smith as it helps in designing the technical content for the company.

Section 4: Privacy

There are various privacy threats that are arise for the business when it presences online. These threats can be access of personal and confidential information for wrong purpose and people can also sell the personal information to the third party without taking nay permission (Zaki, et al., 2014).

Thus, such practices consider as an unethical for the business and this also reduce the privacy of the business. Besides that, with the growing number of false practices also increase the chances of the manipulation, wrong exercise, fraud, misleading etc (Butler and Rodrick, 2015)

This can be proving harmful for the online business entity as their whole work is performing and operate on the online platform. Thus, Dr Smith is needs to install only those systems that provide privacy to the information so that false practices can be reducing.

Australian laws regarding privacy information

Dr Smith should need to know about the Australian privacy laws. Likewise, privacy law act 1988 helps the business to regulate personal information of the individual so that personal data can be protected from the unauthorized access.

By following the privacy act, business can also able to set out the standards, rights and obligations for the handling of the personal information and this law also support the business in terms to provide the security and privacy to mail, e-mails and other forms of communications (Han et al., 2011).

Moreover, privacy law of Australia can provide positive influences on the business operations as this allows the business to collect the solicited personal information but only by giving the receipt and notice about the collection of information so that chances of frauds can be reduced (Mishra and Smyth, 2013).

This law also provide security to the sensitive information of the business and the sensitive information’s are the racial or ethnic origin, religious beliefs and information regarding the people personal information etc.

Thus for the online business, it will prove to be beneficial in terms to protect the personal information of the individual so that hackers could not use for making their personal benefits. Thus, this law supports the collection of personal information of the individual but by following the ethical process and it also provide positive influence to the business.

Business commitment to the customers

The business can communicate its privacy commitment to the customers by promising them to protect their personal information from any unauthorised access like hackers. Company by using the effective security system like collaboration system and KMS, they can protect the personal information of the customers.

Company need to make one more commitment to the customers that they will not sell their personal information to other parities for making their profits. Thus, such commitments help the company to get the trust of the customers upon the company.

Similarly, Dr. Smith for collection of the information about the customer’s requires making certain commitments to the customers, so that customers can develop the trust and faith on the business functions.

Two example of business commitments are as follows:

Company need to pledge that they should not use the personal data of the customers for achieving their competitive advantage like selling their data to other party for gaining their own benefits.
Company need to assure the customer that they are using the advanced and updated technology or system for managing privacy and security risks (Baltzan, et al., 2015).

Global information privacy issues

There are various global information privacy issues that Dr smith should need to aware about that so that he can easily perform its operations in the global platform and able to protect the data from the unauthorised access of hackers. The issues that can be arising with the global platform are the privacy breach, web surfing behaviour issues.

Besides that for the online business, the growing concerns are the collection of large information of the customers, issue related to data/ computer and information security design and properly utilize the software, hardware in order to provide security to the information (Becerra-Fernandez and Sabherwal, 2014).

These issues are challenging the online business to effectively implement their operations at the global level. So, Dr Smith should need to aware about such problems in advance for performing efficient in the global online platform.

Conclusion and recommendation

From the above discussion, it can be said that the current business environment is fully based on the technology. In this environment, it is difficult for an organisation to make the profit with concerning of the technology and modern techniques of the of business process.

In this, it is found that e- business is a process that allows the organisation to sell their products online business platform. It reduces the issue of distance between the seller and buyer.

Along with this, it is also concluded that the use of the online platform help the company to achieve the competitive advantage (Baltzan, et al., 2015). But, in order to run the business at online platform, the company should to keep a strong data base system.

At the same time, it is also recommended that the company should choose an effective combination of the hardware and software (Guerra & Andrews, 2011). It is because the success of the data base management system depends on the hardware and software.

It is also recommended that the company should select the different kinds of tools and method according to budget and need after the depth analysis of options.

For the part three, it is recommended that Dr Smith should need to use collaborative system in their online business because it develops the coordination among its employees and team members and this result in attaining the common goals (Baltzan, et al., 2015).

But at the same time company need to also use the content and knowledge management system for efficiently sharing of knowledge so that productivity can be generated. In the case of content management system, Dr Smith can able to develop the creative and relevant content for their blogs and product page that helps the company to attract the maximum customers (Karim, 2011).

For the part 4, it is recommended that Dr. Smith should need to follow the Australia privacy act in their business operations so that company can satisfy its customers and employees by protecting their personal information from the unauthorised access.

Moreover, company should also make commitment to the customers regarding their information security so that trust and faith among the customers can be generate. Besides that, Dr Smith should to follow the policies, rules and regulations of the privacy so that, business can work ethically and able to satisfy its stakeholders.

References

Al-Debei, M. M. (2011). Data warehouse as a backbone for business intelligence: Issues and challenges. European Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Sciences, 33.

Baltzan, P., Lynch, K. and Fisher, J. (2015) Business-driven Information Systems. USA: John Wiley & Sons.

Becerra-Fernandez, I., and Sabherwal, R. (2014) Knowledge management: Systems and processes. UK: Routledge

Butler, D. A. and Rodrick, S. (2015) Australian media law. Thomson Reuters (Professional) Australia Limited.

Chen, H., Chiang, R. H., & Storey, V. C. (2012). Business intelligence and analytics: From big data to big impact. MIS quarterly, 36(4), 1165-1188.

Cuzzocrea, A., Bellatreche, L., & Song, I. Y. (2013). Data warehousing and OLAP over big

data: current challenges and future research directions. In Proceedings of the sixteenth international workshop on Data warehousing and OLAP (pp. 67-70). ACM.

Elhart, I., Langheinrich, M., Memarovic, N., and Rubegni, E. (2016) A good balance of costs and benefits: convincing a university administration to support the installation of an interactive multi-application display system on campus. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays pp. 197-203. ACM.

Guerra, J., & Andrews, D. (2011). Why you need a data warehouse.Copyright Andrews Consulting Group, Inc, 1-8.

Han, J., Pei, J. and Kamber, M. (2011) Data mining: concepts and techniques. Elsevier.

Imeson, F., Emtenan, A., Garg, S. and Tripunitara, M. V. (2013). Securing Computer Hardware Using 3D Integrated Circuit (IC) Technology and Split Manufacturing for Obfuscation. In USENIX Security (Vol. 13).

Karim, A. J. (2011). The value of competitive business intelligence system (CBIS) tostimulate competitiveness in global market. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 2(19).

Khodakarami, F., and Chan, Y. E. (2014) Exploring the role of customer relationshipmanagement (CRM) systems in customer knowledge creation. Information & Management, 51(1),pp.27-42.

Kimball, R., & Caserta, J. (2011). The Data Warehouse? ETL Toolkit: Practical Techniques for Extracting, Cleaning, Conforming, and Delivering Data. United States: John Wiley & Sons.

Mayer, J. H. (2013). Current changes in executive work and how to handle them by redesigning executive information systems. In Accounting information systems for decision making (pp. 151-173). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Mishra, V. and Smyth, R. (2013) Are more senior academics really more research productive than junior academics? Evidence from Australian law schools. Scientometrics, 96(2), pp. 411-425.

Panetto, H., Zdravkovic, M., Jardim-Goncalves, R., Romero, D., Cecil, J., and Mezgár, I. (2016) New perspectives for the future interoperable enterprise systems. Computers in Industry, 79pp.47-63.

Verma, N. and Voida, A. (2016) On Being Actionable: Mythologies of Business Intelligence and Disconnects in Drill Downs. In Proceedings of the 2016 Group Conferences

Zaki, M. J., Meira Jr, W. and Meira, W. (2014) Data mining and analysis: fundamental concepts and algorithms. UK: Cambridge University Press.

Appendix 1

Task 1: Personal Research Journal

The main aim of this assignment is to develop understanding of the implications of IT to bring the business into the modern online business world. Through my work on research paper, I have learned how to do stronger research and use an objective voice, but I still need to work on structure and transitions.

“For this, we as a team had to develop a report to provide the firm with information regarding hardware and software, including networking infrastructure, or the cloud service arrangements, benefits of business intelligence and collaboration system and privacy issues on an online presence.

This assignment was based on a complex structure due to inclusion of different parts related to IT development. In order to simplify the assignment, my team categorized this assignment into different parts including executive summary, introduction, discussion and conclusion and recommendations and presentation.

I allocated executive summary, introduction, some parts of discussion and presentation to my teammate, whereas I decided to work on remaining part of discussion and presentation and conclusion. We discussed regarding this work, available materials and time planning. I started to lay the groundwork for it.

I and my team mate collected all notes, study materials and searched different online sources including journals and books and websites that could provide related information. I and my teammate wanted to explore and develop understanding of this aspect.

Meanwhile, I tried to read quite widely to develop understanding of IT techniques and tools in business. As we had divided and assigned different parts of the assignment, we started to write the allocate parts.

At the same time, we conducted meetings with our mentor to develop understanding of this topic. Our mentor raised the point that my discussion of assignment lacked depth, and then these points have been addressed to complete this assignment.

The advices of the mentor helped us to increase the quality of the assignment and helped to develop understanding of effectively conducting similar studies in future.

My mentor highlighted the lacking areas related to assignment and gave detailed explanations for the desirability of the changes. Apart from this, we also discussed to each other and decided timeline for each activity and tried to finish it on time. However, my teammate faced some issues while completing the assigned activities on time; but overall, we got success to complete this assignment within the limited time.

This assignment helped me to develop my problem solving and written and oral communication skills. I have demonstrated time management, problem solving and communication skills at various stages of doing this assignment and preparing for and making the presentation.

It was challenging to complete the assignment and presentation without my interpersonal and communication skills. This assignment also helped me to upgrade my problem solving and communication skills that can be helpful for me in professional career.

It gave me opportunity to learn how to apply the subjective knowledge in practical situation to solve a problem and enhance my communication skills through assignment writing, presentation preparation and discussion with mentor and teammate. Overall, it was a great experience for me to learn something new during this assignment.