HND Management in IT Assignment

PART A

Maslow identified five levels of need, classified under two general headings: primary needs and secondary needs. Those needs are:

1. Physiological needs – these are basic needs to ensure survival (food, warms, shelter and etc.)
2. Safety need – these needs related to remaining safe; in the industrial content, job security may be one of them.
3. Social needs – these needs reflect a desire to feel loved and belong. A feeling of being accepted as part of the team is an industrial aspect of this need.
4. Esteem needs – the need to be held in esteem, a worthy and valuable colleague. Also need for self-esteem. To have status.
5. Self Actualisation – a psychologists “buzz phrase” which can be interpreted as ‘What a man can be, he must be’.

PART B

Decision Support Systems (DSS) are a class of computerized information system that support decision-making activities. DSS are interactive computer-based systems and subsystems intended to help decision makers use communications technologies, data, documents, knowledge and/or models to complete decision process tasks.

A decision support system may present information graphically and may include an expert system or artificial intelligence (AI). It may be aimed at business executives or some other group of knowledge workers.
Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present would be, (a) Accessing all information assets, including legacy and relational data sources; (b) Comparative data figures; (c) Projected figures based on new data or assumptions; (d) Consequences of different decision alternatives, given past experience in a specific context.
There are a number of Decision Support Systems. These can be categorized into five types:

• Communication-driven DSS 
  Most communications-driven DSSs are targetted at internal teams, including partners. Its purpose are to help conduct a meeting, or for users to collaborate. The most common technology used to deploy the DSS is a web or client server. Examples: chats and instant messaging softwares, online collaboration and net-meeting systems.
• Data-driven DSS 
  Most data-driven DSSs are targeted at managers, staff and also product/service suppliers. It is used to query a database or data warehouse to seek specific answers for specific purposes. It is deployed via a main frame system, client/server link, or via the web. Examples: computer-based databases that have a query system to check (including the incorporation of data to add value to existing databases.
• Document-driven DSS 
  Document-driven DSSs are more common, targeted at a broad base of user groups. The purpose of such a DSS is to search web pages and find documents on a specific set of keywords or search terms. The usual technology used to set up such DSSs are via the web or a client/server system. Examples:
• Knowledge-driven DSS: 
  Knowledge-driven DSSs or 'knowledgebase' are they are known, are a catch-all category covering a broad range of systems covering users within the organization seting it up, but may also include others interacting with the organization - for example, consumers of a business. It is essentially used to provide management advice or to choose products/services. The typical deployment technology used to set up such systems could be slient/server systems, the web, or software runnung on stand-alone PCs.
• Model-driven DSS 
  Model-driven DSSs are complex systems that help analyse decisions or choose between different options. These are used by managers and staff members of a business, or people who interact with the organization, for a number of purposes depending on how the model is set up - scheduling, decision analyses etc. These DSSs can be deployed via software/hardware in stand-alone PCs, client/server systems, or the web.

Abbreviated DSS, the term refers to an interactive computerized system that gathers and presents data from a wide range of sources, typically for business purposes. DSS applications are systems and subsystems that help people make decisions based on data that is culled from a wide range of sources.

For example: a national on-line book seller wants to begin selling its products internationally but first needs to determine if that will be a wise business decision. The vendor can use a DSS to gather information from its own resources (using a tool such as OLAP) to determine if the company has the ability or potential ability to expand its business and also from external resources, such as industry data, to determine if there is indeed a demand to meet. The DSS will collect and analyze the data and then present it in a way that can be interpreted by humans. Some decision support systems come very close to acting as artificial intelligence agents.
DSS applications are not single information resources, such as a database or a program that graphically represents sales figures, but the combination of integrated resources working together.
PART C
a)

Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats ), PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological analysis),STEER analysis (Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors), and EPISTEL (Environment, Political, Informatic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal).

Strategic planning is the formal consideration of an organization's future course. All strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:

1.   "What do we do?"

2.   "For whom do we do it?"

3.   "How do we excel?"

In business strategic planning, the third question is better phrased "How can we beat or avoid competition?". (Bradford and Duncan, page 1).

In many organizations, this is viewed as a process for determining where an organization is going over the next year or more -typically 3 to 5 years, although some extend their vision to 20 years.

In order to determine where it is going, the organization needs to know exactly where it stands, then determine where it wants to go and how it will get there. The resulting document is called the "strategic plan."

It is also true that strategic planning may be a tool for effectively plotting the direction of a company; however, strategic planning itself cannot foretell exactly how the market will evolve and what issues will surface in the coming days in order to plan your organizational strategy. Therefore, strategic innovation and tinkering with the 'strategic plan' have to be a cornerstone strategy for an organization to survive the turbulent business climate.

b)

Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) is a computer based information system that can help organisations support their strategic planning and strategies. Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) is the process of aligning an organization's business strategy with effective computer-based information systems to achieve critical business objectives. SISP is a top concern of major executives and considerable resources (time and money) are spent in SISP activities. Many SISP initiatives are not successful due to the difficulty of implementing the recommendations. A significant problem is the Specification Gap between the description of the recommended systems and the detail needed for actual system implementation. Existing SISP methods do not provide sufficiently rigorous representations to specify detailed system recommendations. Box structures are proposed as a solution to this problem and a SISP process with embedded box structure methods is presented. We have used this innovative process in two SISP projects with large organizations. Partial results from one of the projects are presented as a case study to illustrate the use of box structures and their benefits.

PART D

a)

Information system has a lot of aspects and tools to help an organisation develop strategically. Web based collaboration tools like Basecamp of 37Signals helps developers/companies/organisations to share files and ideas, assign tasks, meet deadlines and centralize feedback. Backpack product of 37signals helps to publish and share the information within your team. Companies like Online50 give hosted services for all sorts of organisations and companies including financial companies. These service enable organisations do their business effectively without spending a lot of money and time.

b)

Web and Internet are the most important Information Technologies of our time. In our time web and Internet are more advanced and it came to the level that success of a Strategic Information System is an imaginable without them. Web and Internet create a lot of opportunities for strategic planning and deploying the computer application developed for the web.

Developing internet based applications is not that complicated and costly as it used to be. There are a lot of desktop and web based tools available to develop and deploy the applications on the Internet. There are a lot of tools available to develop, test, advertise and get feedback from people. Some examples of those tools are Blogging and Bloggers, Social Network; Intranet based Social Networks, Social groups (groups on Facebook, meetup.com) and so on.

Especially during the last decade many web application developing tools and approaches created. MVC (model-view-controller) is a modern approach for organising the code and data and keeping data separate from the logic. Lots of frameworks were being developed during the last decade. Some of them Django (Python programming language based framework), Zend Framework (PHP programming language based framework), Ruby on Rails (Ruby programming language based framework) and so on.

Web based collaboration tools like Basecamp of 37Signals helps developers/companies/organisations to share files and ideas, assign tasks, meet deadlines and centralize feedback. Backpack product of 37signals helps to publish and share the information within your team.
Source:
Web: http://www.gdrc.org/decision/dss-types.html
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/d/decision_support_system.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_planning
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/HICSS.2000.926735