IT Solutions and Technologies

IT Solutions and Technologies

Introduction

From the 1990s until now, information technology (IT) has shaped the way companies organize their business process, communicate with customers, and provide products and services. An effective and efficient alignment of IT strategies supporting business strategies and processes becomes a primary factor for a successful company in the highly competitive market. IT solutions and technologies have still been the top issue and also the no. 1 concern for organizational executives and professional IT practitioners (Batra, 2012; Chen, Chiang & Storey, 2012).

IT is a key business function because it shapes and supports business strategy in most of the companies. The companies’ investment in IT solutions expects to gain benefits such as improving productivities, increasing performance, or obtaining a competitive business advantage. While traditional management reserves IT as an implementation tool, recently business leaders believe IT can play a pro-active role in developing a long-term business strategy. IT managers’ activities and business executives’ work must be synchronized towards common IT-oriented objectives.

IT solutions have covered in various technologies such as enterprise resource planning, supplier relationship management, customer relationship management (CRM), social media, mobile technology, cloud computing, and Big Data. However, this document will focus on four hot solutions, i.e., Big Data, CRM, Cloud Computing, and Social Media in this individual project.

Big Data

     1. What is Big Data?

            According to Boyd, Danah, and Crawford, Kate (2011) [1], Big Data is one of the most clamorous topics for study because it is recent challenging and causes a lot of attention and curiosity to industry and academia. In new standard computing, automation and Web technologies recently (Connolly & Begg, 2014), data at the low cost of storage and processing becomes ample and ubiquitous. Data ubiquity with Big Data drives the evolution of data, information into particularly knowledge and wisdom to accelerate spontaneously at ultra-fast speed (Gartner Group, 2013)

Chen, Chiang and Storey (2012) define that  Big Data is a relative term used to describe data that has colossal volume in a variety of form structures at the high velocity of capture and veracity. The academic community considers Big Data as data with four dimensions (i.e., 4 V’s: volume, variety, velocity, and veracity). Other scholars add the fifth dimension, called value, in Big Data. Big Data, which is generated by individual humans, machines, transactions, and sensors in many public and private organizations, cannot be stored, analyzed or processed in the existing standard equipment.

            Figure 1 illustrates Big Data Analytics with three objectives.

Source: Adapted from Techno Software (2016)

     2. Big data’s types

Big Data can be characterized into three typical types (AllSight, 2016). Structured data or relational data can be stored and analyzed in relational databases. Unstructured data is the most difficult to deal with. Data are generated from GPS, blogs, mobile data, PDF files, web log data, etc. And semi-structured data or XML data is data in the form of XML or JSON format.

Figure 2: Typical data types of Big Data 

Source: Adapted from AllSight (2016).

     3. Some statistics on Big Data

According to Bloomberg Businessweek (2011), 97 percent of many companies in Fortune 500 have used business analytics and some forms of Big Data analytics to conduct their business. Big Data analytics that processes data into information and particularly knowledge has emerged as a contemporary business trend in industry and academics (Minelli, Chambers & Dhiraj, 2013). As a result of big data analytics in high motion, Big Data will make a great impact on all fields of business, industry, healthcare, education, and government to people in the next 10 to 15 years (Novemtum, 2015). Big Data Analytics (BDA) becomes part of everyday life. Typical future trends on BDA in IT solutions are:

          - Changes brought by new and better products.

          - Improved ability to meet customer needs.

          - Plan the experience with BDA insights about customers and their interactions.

          - Predict and prevent in every industry: manufacturing, healthcare, energy, etc.

          - Play on new ways of automation in business.

          - New best practices.

     4. Big Data in future applications

According to Cukier (2015), enterprises use information as a foundation for business in thousands of years. Big Data that is processed by IT practitioners for insightful information is changing business, and business will change organizations and society. Three key features to change organizational enterprises in the future are: 

          - Enterprises use Big Data to attain disruptive innovation for radically novel products and new markets.

          - Organizations apply Big Data to identify many tiny improvements or small winds then add these small wins up for competitive success.  

          - Companies embrace data alongside with human values of justice, decency, and common sense to move forward.

Goldman Sachs (2014), the global investment research company, reports that the Internet of Things (IoT) that has generated Big Data as the third wave of the development of the Internet may be the biggest one. Notice that the first wave was 1990’s fixed Internet technology and the second wave was 2000’s mobile technology. Goldman Sachs recognizes the IoT benchmark of five verticals of adoption: Wearables, Cars, Homes, Cities, and Industrials. They focus on:

          - Enablers: Increasing share for WI-Fi, sensors, and low-cost microcontrollers.

          - Platforms: Focusing on software applications to manage communications between devices, middleware, storage, and data analytics.

          - Industrials: Home automation is at the forefront while factory floor optimization may lead the efficiency, productivities. Researchers at Oxford University predict that 47% of work done today in the US will be taken over by computerization.

People also concern issues of privacy and security on Big Data (Buddin, 2015).  

Therefore, Big Data is one of IT solutions and technologies for competitive advantage.

Customer Relationship Management

     1. What is a customer relationship management?

            According to Payne and Frow (2005), a customer relationship management or CRM was rooted from SFA (Sale Force Automation), or information-enabled relationship marketing in the information technology (IT) vendor and practitioner community (Ryals & Payne, 2001). CRM was defined differently among scholars, practitioners, and authorities. CRM can be defined based on three perspectives (1) a narrow and tactical approach, (2) a broad and strategic approach, and (3) a customer-centric approach. CRM is a strategic approach that is concerned with creating improved shareholder value through the development of appropriate relationships with key customers and customer segments. This student defines the CRM as a strategic process used to learn more about customers’ needs and better understand customers’ behaviors to strengthen organizational processes to exceed customers’ expectation in a good relationship.

     2. CRM’s framework

The companies use the customers-centric CRM to manage Sales (telephone, the Web, retail store, and field sales), Marketing (campaign data, content, and data analysis), and Services (call center data, Web self-service data, and wireless data) in a company as shown in Figure 3:

            Figure 3: CRM is used to manage Sales, Marketing, and Services

Source: Adapted from Pearlson and Saunders (2004).

The process-oriented cross-functional CRM includes five key interactive sets of strategic processes that start with a review of strategy activities and end with the improvement in business performance results as shown in Figure 3.

            Figure 4: The conceptual process-oriented cross-functional framework of CRM. 

Source: Adapted from Payne and Frow (2005).

            These key strategic processes sets, that are (a) process of developing strategies, (b) process of creating values, (c) process of integrating multi-channels, (d) process of managing information, and (e) process of assessing performance, interact with them in bi-directions and iterations.CRM manages all ways to handle existing and potentially new customers. It is a business and technology discipline. It uses information system to coordinate entire business processes. It provides end-to-end customer care. It supplies a unified view of customer across the company. It consolidates customer data from multiple sources and provides analytical tools for responding questions (Salesforce, 2017).    

     3. CRM is an IT solution

            CRM use information technology and human resources to gain insight into customers’ value and behaviors to increase the company’s revenue. CRM’s goals are (a) providing products to meet customers’ needs, (b) providing better customer service, (c) cross-selling products more effectively, (d) assisting sales staff to close the deals quickly, (e) retaining the current customers, and (f) acquiring new customers (Wailgum, 2007).

The organizations need CRM systems because the CRM systems manage all ways to handle existing and potentially new customers. The CRM system is a business and technology discipline that uses the information system to coordinate entire business processes. The CRM system provides end-to-end customer care and supplies a unified view of the customer across the company. It consolidates customer data from multiple sources and provides analytical tools for responding questions (Salesforce, 2017). Many organizations utilize the customers-centric CRM to manage Sales (telephone, the Web, retail store, and field sales), Marketing (campaign data, content, and data analysis), and Services (call center data, Web self-service data, and wireless data). Thus, CRM is an IT solution and technology for competitive advantage. 

Cloud Computing

     1. What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a practice of data management on the network of remote servers connected to the Internet. Data management as an IT solution on the cloud includes capturing, collecting, storing, accessing, processing, querying, programming, and retrieving data via the router to the Internet. Data is often massive data sets. An individual user can access the data or programs over the Internet (Griffith, 2016). NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2009) defines cloud computing as a model for enabling on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. For example, Microsoft uses cloud computing to distribute a local piece of Microsoft Office 365 or storage Microsoft OneDrive to users. Cloud computing services have grown rapidly from $47.4 billion in 2013 to expected $107.2 billion in 2017 as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5 displays a fast growth of Cloud Computing.

Source: Adapted from idc.com

Many cloud computing providers offer an on-demand delivery model of information technology for IT solutions such as Pay-as-you-go cloud technology services. The impact of the pay-as-you-go cloud technology services grows rapidly along the fast maturity of the cloud computing and a popular-in-demand trend of big data analytics (Intel IT Center, 2015):

          - Infrastructure: A huge, sophisticated, complex infrastructure is built at providers’ plants, facilities. For providers, it must be operated and maintained by skillful professionals. Users do not have to worry about their infrastructure.

          - Hardware: many distributed clusters of computers, servers to support tools for processing data with 5 V’s (volume, variety, velocity, veracity, and value).

Cloud requires pools of servers, storage, networking resources with scalability and flexibility. Backup systems are also developed, deployed and distributed on providers’ side. Users simply have some servers for their applications.

          - Software: For providers, all advanced Big Data Analytics tools are complicated and in place. For users, they just need to understand application software layers such as installation, panels, GUI, and backup with simpler tasks.        

          - Personnel: For providers, they need a good team of skillful professionals to develop, design, maintain, control and operate the pay-as-you-go cloud technology systems and cloud-based big data analytics in 24/7 operations, proactive response. They also need an efficient communication network and field application team to deal with customers’ demands. For users, they need a few good professional have knowledge of hardware and software of pay-as-you-go cloud technology services for users’ friendly-use applications.

          - Services: Effective, low-cost services with the quick response by providers to users’ requests.

          - Other long-term impacts are customer retention, market share growth and sale increase. 

            Figure 6: Cloud computing is an on-demand network

Source: Adapted from Gulia (2016)

            Cloud Computing is a result from multiple regional networks linking computers evolved in four stages: (a) networks (TCP/IP driven), (b) Internet (Document driven), (c) Grid Computing (Software standards for sharing remote resources), and (d) Cloud Computing (Everything as a service).

     2. Cloud computing is an IT solution

Recently, cloud computing becomes an emerging computing model for processing Big Data for IT solutions due to flexibility, scalability, virtualization,  and lower costs in many organizations. A cloud computing model with various components is shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7 displays several key characteristics and various components.  

Source: Adapted from National Institute of Standards and Technology (2009).

            The IT trend on cloud computing is on the rise of popular demand because of several reasons. One of the reasons is lowering trade capital expense for variable expense such as zero cost to get started and pay as users go. Virtuous cycle decreases cost over time significantly, e.g., more companies, more usage, more infrastructure, economies of sale, lower infrastructure cost, and reduced pricing. Cloud service users do not need to guess capacity needs such that they can speed and focus agility and business core. Furthermore, users can avoid uncertain growth patterns in strategic planning and business strategy. Today, some typical cloud computing providers are AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft’s Cloud Platform.

For cloud computing’s applications, healthcare organizations adopt cloud computing in their applications. Columbus (2014) from Forbes consultant firm addressed some advantages from the statistical 2014 HIMSS (Health Information and Management System Society) Analytics Cloud Survey on having health care data in the cloud. Most of the healthcare organizations adopt cloud computing solution because of three primary reasons:
     - The cloud computing-based IT system has less maintenance cost (55.7%) than the current traditional IT system.

     - The speed of deployment is faster about 53.2%.

     - Solving problem of less internal staff and less expertise to support on-premise alternatives up to 51.6%.

Some healthcare organizations do not apply cloud computing solution because three top reasons are shown below:

     - 61.4% of companies concern security problem.

     - 42.3% of companies do not use cloud computing solution because their IT operations have functioned well internally.

     - 38.4% of companies concern uptime and availability of cloud computing services.

     Other issues related to health care organizations and cloud service providers are:

     - 48.3% of healthcare providers have performance and downtime issues with their cloud service providers.

     - 32.5% reports hosted applications and data have slow responsiveness.

     - 23.3% reports downtime and unavailability of applications and data.

     - 3.3% reports slow response rate for data backup in the cloud

Other challenges of using cloud computing based solution are operations visibility (21%), customer service (20%), costs and fees (19%), availability and uptime (16%), migration of services or data (15%), contractual issues (6%).

Figure 8 displays a summary of cloud computing. The blue boxes are controlled by cloud service users. The gray boxes are controlled by the cloud service providers.

Source: Adapted from Dr. Kapoor (Microsoft, 2017).

     3. Cloud computing and security issues

Clouds have major security issues in association with confidentiality, integrity, availability, and privacy of the data and applications outsourced to the cloud. For instance, exploitation of co-tenancy and data outsourcing are typical major features of cloud computing system, but both features are also security issues. Since a cloud is a shared resource, e.g., physical hardware, by multiple users, system vulnerabilities become a big concern due to corrupted data, leaked data, or even unavailable data for access. Data stored in a cloud is often an easy target for cyberattacks by both internal hackers and external hackers. The threats can be passive, active, and sophisticated in five layers of cloud security: perimeter layer (cloud applications), network layer (data transmission), servers (databases, client data), applications layer (programming), data layer (inconsistent data) (Mell, P. (2012). The new decisions related to information security management were changed with new measures and solutions sought from big data analytics techniques. To detect advanced persistent threats such as malware for data confidentiality and integrity, the innovative big data security analytics tools should be developed based on machine learning approach (Elovici, 2014).

Social Media

     1 What is social media?

            Social networks are a new form of informal networks. In information technology, social network is an IT-centric network that connects people to enable them to find experts, meet online colleagues, and see professionals who have related experience for projects. People are linked in the company or in the same field across traditional organization lines (Pearlson & Saunders, 2004). 

            Figure 9 displays various social media.

Source: Adapted from Kister (2016).

Social media are computer-medicated technology that facilitates the creating and sharing ideas, information and various forms of expression via virtual communities and networks (Obar, Wildman, 2015). Social media’s common features are (a) social media are interactive an Internet- oriented application from Web 2.0, (b) social media includes user-generated data and information such as text posts, comments, photos, videos, etc., (c) users create service profiles on the website designed and maintained by social media organizations., and (d) social media organizations provide online social networks by connecting a user’s profile with other users’ profiles or groups. Some popular social media are Facebook, WhatApp, Twitter, etc.   

Figure 10 displays a rank chart of social media by users.

Source: Adapted from Dr. Kapoor (Microsoft, 2017).

     2. Social media technology

            Social media use desktop computers, mobile technologies such as smartphones, tablet computers, and web-based technologies to create interactive platforms for individuals, communities and organizations that can discuss, share, mutually create, and modify users’ contents posted online. Social media provide revolutionary changes to communications between people, businesses, organizations, and communities over time. The changes are the focus of the emerging field of technoself studies (Kietzmann &  Hermkens, 2011). 

            Social media are much different from traditional paper-based media such as magazines and newspapers, or conventional electronic digital-based media such as TV broadcasting in many ways: quality, reaching, frequency, usability, immediacy, and permanence. Social media run in a dialogic transmission system from many sources to many receivers. Some of the most popular websites are Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Baidu Tieba, Gab, Googles+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, Twitter, Viber, WeChat, YouTube, etc. Facebook and Twitter become much more popular, and usage of YouTube has grown significantly (Pavlik & McIntosh, 2015). Social Media changes relate to overtime usage change on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11 shows the rapid growth of social media Facebook vs.the flat myspace.

Source: Adapted from Dr. Kapoor (2017).

Using Facebook has some pros and cons. The pros are it is easy to create a central page, easy to check while browsing the site, simple layout, larger potential audience. Facebook provide space for basic information, a variety of post types. However, Facebook also has some cons. For example, there is no control over comments. It is time- consuming for regular updates. It must be checked daily to respond to questions from others.      

     3. Social media is an IT solution

            Social media’s model of generating or consuming data has changed significantly. In the old model, a few companies are generating data for all others to consume the data.

In today model, all of us including individuals, communities, and organizations are generating data, and all of us are using the data. Social media with IoT and Cloud computing contribute to phenomenon data explosion. People face the big challenges in handling with ubiquitous Big Data in terms of massive volume, various formats, fast processing, and veracity as shown in Figure 12.  

            Figure 12 displays Big Data boom.

Source: Adapted from Dr. Kapoor (2017).

            Using social media has both positive and negative impacts. In IT solution, social media can improve customers’ sense of connection with real or online organizations and communities. Social media can be an effective tool for marketing campaign and communication in many fields such as business, politics, or society. Many corporations, entrepreneurs, nonprofit organizations, advocacy groups, political parties, and governments use social media to support their activities. Social media applications in IT and IS (information systems) include marketing research on offline consumer movements, communication between C2C (company-to-consumer approach), sales promotions and discounts, relationship development and loyalty programs, e-commerce (Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger, 2012). However, there is some concern of depression, online harassment, cyberbullying from heavy use of social media.   

Conclusion

            This research document presented modern IT solutions and contemporary technologies for competitive advantage. Four top solutions that were discussed in details were (a) Big Data, (b) Customer Relationship Management, (c) Cloud Computing, and (d) Social Media. In Big Data technology, Big Data’s definition, Big Data Analytics, Big Data types, statistics, its future applications were addressed. In CRM technology, CRM’s definition, conceptual framework, and CRM solution were discussed in-depth. In Cloud Computing technology, the document defined Cloud Computing, its rapid growth in everything as a service, a Cloud model, security, and Cloud summary were examined. Social Media technology was defined, and ranked as one of the fast growth in IT solutions and technologies in highly dynamic and competitive market. Notice that many charts and diagrams were included to provide a visualization view of four IT solutions (more than three required solutions) in this document.   

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