Lecture 2. Role and Importance of Information
It has been said before and you hear it everywhere: Information is power. The importance of information to individuals and organizations, and therefore the need to manage it well, is growing rapidly. Now more than ever, we need to understand the critical role information plays in so many aspects of business and life. It drives our communication, our decision making, and our reactions to the entire environment.
Information is vital to communication, and a critical resource for performing work in organizations. Business managers spend most of their day in meetings, reading, writing, and communicating with other managers, subordinates, customers, vendors, and other constituents via telephone, in person, or by e-mail. Indeed, management itself is information processing. It involves gathering, processing, and disseminating information. Managing information involves coping with a myriad of information sources and ultimately making decisions about what to do with it.
A manager must track and/or react to information flowing from sources inside and outside the organization. The manager processes this river of information and disseminates it in one of four ways: stores it, uses it, passes it on, and/or discards it. For example, during the course of a normal business day, a marketing manager for a high-technology company receives information in the form of e-mail, telephone calls, letters, reports, memos, trade publications, and formal and informal conversations.
Every job, project, and/or task involves decision making. Decision making is the process of identifying, selecting, and implementing alternatives. The right information, in the right form, at the right time is needed to make correct decisions. For example, based on information about customers, competitors, and production capabilities, a manager may decide to alert top executives that a strategic decision needs to be made. Top executives would use the information received to identify alternatives for consideration. Each alternative would then be evaluated based on feasibility, cost, time to implement, consistency with corporate strategy, and other criteria.
On the basis of their assessment, top executives would select the alternative that makes the most business sense and begin implementation. Finally, information would be gathered to assess the quality of the decisions that were made.
Task 1. Discussion activity. Given the recent corporate accounting scandals with companies like Enron and WorldCom, there is an obvious responsibility of employees to provide accurate information- but there are also obvious gray areas between what you feel is accurate information and what stockholders or stakeholders may feel is accurate information. Is it fair that as an employee, you may be held criminally liable for information you produce in the workplace? Does your opinion change if you are the stockholder who has just lost a few million dollars because of that information?
Organizations must strive to make sense of their environment in order to survive, as well as to achieve and/or exceed performance objectives. The environment is a potentially useful source of information. That is one reason why so many organizations are working hard to listen to their customers and watch their competitors so closely.
Organizations need to ensure that their information-processing systems are properly integrated, and that the necessary information is flowing in from the environment and being supplied to the right people in the organization. For instance, it would make sense to share customer complaint data about a specific product with the members of the product development team responsible for redesign. More organizations are using computers and information systems to process the burgeoning amount of information they face. More sources of information are becoming available to organizations as a result of information technologies such as electronic databases, information networks, and electronic bulletin boards.
Information is of value to decision makers if it is accurate, timely, complete, and relevant. These four criteria are used to distinguish valuable information from information that is of less value.
Accurate information provides a reliable and valid representation of reality. The cost of inaccurate or distorted information can be extremely high. Consider the demise of the multimillion dollar Mars Climate Orbiter launched by NASA in 1998. The tragic outcome of this mission was blamed on the failure of one scientific team to recognize and correct an error in information from another team. Findings indicate that one team used English units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for key spacecraft operations affecting navigation. This oversight caused the orbiter to burn up in Mars atmosphere before it could deploy to the surface. Oops.
Timely information is information that is available when it is needed. When information is needed almost always depends on the situation. In the fast-paced world of air travel, commercial airlines need virtually daily updates on what other commercial airlines are doing with their ticket prices. If one airline reduces its airfares from Newark International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport, other airlines flying the same route would find out quickly about it and respond in a similar manner. Other projects, such as real estate development, might require months of information gathering and assessment. Spending six months preparing a report on the environmental impacts of a real estate development project might be an acceptable timeframe in this situation.
Complete information tends to be comprehensive in covering the issue or topic of interest. Complete information tells a complete story. Without complete information, a decision maker will get a distorted view of reality. Incomplete market information can lead businesses to introduce products and services that customers don't want.
For example, the fashion site Boo.com was to be an international Internet fashion superstore that would offer street fashion on the web. Even though the site was designed for 18 different languages and currencies, the site was not user-friendly, the prices were too high in some cases, and you couldn't really get the true feel for the products. The initial concept was very good and did make some money, but like most Internet startups, they spent more than they made, which is just not good business. All is not lost; with the right strategy and a test market, Boo might have done quite well…had they had the complete information.
Information is relevant if it has significance or can be applied to a specific situation, problem, or issue of interest. Here are some examples of relevant information. Human resource managers need information on hiring and employee turnover; operations managers need information on costs and productivity; marketing managers need information on sales projections and advertising rates; top executives need information on the strategic actions of their competitors. In contrast, product inventory information is not very relevant to a computer programmer.
E-commerce is a great place to watch companies rise (due to the amount of financial backing) and then suddenly crash and burn due to lack of strategy or incomplete information. Online auto sales were a good example of this when they fell flat because companies overestimated the market and did not have complete information about user preferences. Apparently, people were happy to visit dealer sites to gather information about the vehicles; but when it came time to buy, consumers preferred to go to the places they had been buying from for years, or the places that had in-house service for vehicles.
Information obviously fuels most of our daily activities. Knowledge workers who understand the importance of information will have a unique advantage over those who do not. And even more importantly, those who understand the difference between good information sources and poor ones will become knowledge leaders.
Home task
After this lesson, you should be able to write essay (about 250 words):
Explain the importance of information for communication purposes.
Describe the importance of information for decision making.
Summarize the importance of information for understanding and reacting to the environment.
Identify the characteristics of valuable information.
Lecture 3. Hardware
A computer is programmable electronic device that store and process data and information and display the results. The term hardware is used to refer to any physical part of a computer system, such as the keyboard, the monitor and etc.
Computer systems are usually divide into three main categories according to their processing capabilities.
Mainframe computers are large, powerful computers that many people can use at the same time. They are most expensive systems. They are used for very large processing tasks and perform many important business and government application.
IBM mainframes dominate the mainframe market at well over 90% market share. Unisys manufactures ClearPath mainframes, based on earlier Burroughs products and ClearPath mainframes based on Sperry Univac OS 1100 product lines. In 2002, Hitachi co-developed the z-Series z-800 with IBM to share expenses, but subsequently the two companies have not collaborated on new Hitachi models. Hewlett-Packard sells its unique NonStop systems, which it acquired with Tandem Computers and which some analysts classify as mainframes. Groupe Bull's DPS, Fujitsu(formerly Siemens) BS2000, and Fujitsu-ICL VME mainframes are still available in Europe. Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC (the «JCMs») still maintain mainframe hardware businesses in the Japanese market.
The amount of vendor investment in mainframe development varies with market share. Fujitsu and Hitachi both continue to use custom S/390-compatible processors, as well as other CPUs (including POWER, SPARC, MIPS, and Xeon) for lower-end systems. Bull uses a mixture of custom and Xeon processors. NEC and Bull both use a mixture of Xeon and Itanium processors for their mainframes. IBM continues to pursue a different business strategy of mainframe investment and growth. IBM has its own large research and development organization designing new, homegrown CPUs, including mainframe processors such as 2008's 4.4 GHz quad-core z10 mainframe microprocessor. Unisys produces code compatible mainframe systems that range from laptops to cabinet sized mainframes that utilize homegrown CPUs as well as Xeon processors. IBM is rapidly expanding its software business, including its mainframe software portfolio, to seek additional revenue and profits.
Furthermore, there exists a market for software applications to manage the performance of mainframe implementations. Significant players in this market include BMC, Compuware, and CA Technologies.
Minicomputers. These are smaller and more compact systems, and fewer operators can use them compared with a mainframe computer. They are usually found in medium –sized business or in divisions within a large organization, e.g. in government departments.
A variety of companies emerged that built turnkey systems around minicomputers with specialized software and, in many cases, custom peripherals that addressed specialized problems such as computer, computer aided manufacturing, process control, manufacturing resource planning, and so on. Many if not most minicomputers were sold through these original equipment manufacturers and value-added resellers.
Several pioneering computer companies first built minicomputers, such as DEC, Data General, and Hewlett-Packard (HP) (who now refers to its HP3000 minicomputers as «servers» rather than «minicomputers»). And although today's PCs and servers are clearly microcomputers physically, architecturally their CPUs and operating systems have evolved largely by integrating features from minicomputers.
In the software context, the relatively simple OSs for early microcomputers were usually inspired by minicomputer OSs (such as CP/M's similarity to Digital's single user OS/8 and RT-11 and multi-user RSTS time-sharing system). Also, the multiuser OSs of today are often either inspired by, or directly descended from, minicomputer OSs. UNIX was originally a minicomputer OS, while Windows NT kernel—the foundation for all current versions of Microsoft Windows-borrowed design ideas liberally from VMS. Many of the first generation of PC programmers were educated on minicomputer systems.
Microcomputers also called personal computers (PC) – are small, self-contained computers that fit on a desk – top and are usually only used by one person. They are the least expensive type. And are widely used in business for variety of tasks, such as word processing, small database management and spreadsheets.
Computer consists the main typical part. The keyboard is used to get information into the computer. The CPU is used to process thos information, e.g. to do calculation. The monitor is used to display the result and the printer produces a copy of this display.
Task. Students have to work in pair share. Before to continue the lecture, work with a partner and ask and answer the questions below. Base your answer on your possible knowledge of the topic.
Advertisements often display detailed specifications of computers for sale. When considering the choice between one computer and another it is important to understand what the different specifications mean. Here is an example of one such specification and a brief explanation of each item.
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