The Critique on “The Business of Digital Storytelling”

The aim of this journal/publication is actually to showcase the deductions from investigations drawn from selected case studies exploring the implementation and the usage of low cost digital technology platform to gather, process and pass these information in a business to consumer practise.

The research cuts across different discipline, pulling data from a wide range of backgrounds whilst combining quantitative and qualitative data techniques.

This approach is vital in taking decisions in instances like buying and selling of homes where augmentation technologies which simulate a physical presence of a person in the space is achieved. This aids particularly in searching for the most suitable home to purchase and could be very useful for estate agents in the high street.

In spite of the new nature of this technology, people are eager to utilise its services especially coming in mobile technology format and adapt it to business processes.

     Lots of materials were consulted and referenced in the course of producing this article. A huge number of data was pulled and analysed with graphs. The authors of the materials referenced confirmed to the assertions drawn from the journal.

Reference

Burke M. E, O’Callaghan S. and Quigley M. (2013). The business of digital storytelling: Augmenting information systems with QR codes. Journal of Systems and Information Technology. Emerald Insight Publication.

ARSENAL! WHY YOU JUST NEED TO BE A GUNNER!

Omg!

This is why Arsenal is the best team in the world, setting records that can not be broken!

Yay! Can I ever have a blog without my “IDENTITY”? It’s in me!

if you are not a gunner, then you are a goner cos there are only two clubs in the world; Arsenal and others!

Critiquing the White Paper “Top 10 Risks in the Cloud

This White paper points out the complexity of the issue of moving IT infrastructure to the cloud by top business executives and leaders of organisations. It also states that there are many circumstances or contexts where the transitions into cloud technology by organisations pose a great threat. These threats or risks include;

• Reduced governance: cloud involves actual handing over of most of the IT requirements of an organisation to a cloud provider instead of the parent organisation procuring this infrastructure. This exposes the organisation to the risk bothering on loss of data, technology lockdowns, etc.
• Data location: cloud providers may run many data centres in diverse geographical locations in other to provide a platform for back up, offsite storage, etc. the organisations subscribing to these services may not be aware of the location of their data.
• Data ownership: this is a factor that comes up between the organisation and cloud service providers. As data is completely handed over to these providers, the terms and conditions should be well stated to avoid total relinquishing of the rights of data ownership.
• Low visibility to virtual networks: cloud service providers adopt virtualisation in building and managing their services. Organisations should consider compelling traffic to use physical paths to ensure virtual machine to virtual machine attacks are discovered.
• Increased attack surface: considering that virtualisation is the core technology in cloud computing/services, the issue of managing vulnerable situations increases as new classes of software are implored into the environment.
• Identity federation: organisations use the same credentials for their cloud based and in house IT requirements by establishing trust and sharing identity information across access control systems. Organisations weary of this and the vulnerability of this approach.
• Reduced monitoring: monitoring this infrastructure is a critical issue which is imperative in any IT environment. Considering the nature of cloud, multiple tenants may be engaged to do this which increases the chance of information sharing.
• Extreme outages: cases of facility loss, bankruptcy, litigation, are few of the risks that could be faced by cloud users or service providers which will in turn have a devastating effect on the organisation.
• Value concentration: many organisations are subscribing to cloud services and thus providers are facing a huge bank of sensitive data which is consequently bound to attract attention and be potential target for attacks.

It concludes by recommending that factors within the operational confines of an organisation should be considered before transiting to cloud based services.

The article is quite educative although no known research methodology was disclosed although two materials were referenced. Many other negative issues of cloud technology were not mentioned and I feel the article is not all round expository. More research should be carried out to improve on the work done so far.

Reference

Balaji P. (2012) Top 10 risks in the Cloud

The future of Information Sytem in Healthcare

Guys! Isn’t this amazing!

The development of Information system is actually the major key to advancement in the health sector.

In the past years, the management of information services in the health related services could be said to be delegated to a small section of management education. Now, it has become central to all that we do. The importance of this cannot be over emphasized. The key to living a healthy life is circled around building a robust Information System within the health department. 

Wearable technologies are fast developing; patients can monitor their health status at any given point in real time. My fingers are crossed!!!

Reference

Gerald L. G, Detlev H. S. and Donna J. S. (2008) Information Systems for Health Care Management. USA: Chicago health Administration Press, 7th Edition.

Digital Divide

Digital divide was described by (Compaine, 2001) as the gap between those who have access to the latest Information Technologies and those who do not have this access. As it stands today in the Information age, a situation which prevents access to these information is indeed a social and economic handicap. While some people see the digital divide as a national crisis, others consider it an overhyped non-issue.

Digital divide like many other issues existed long before the problem was actually named and studied according to (Servon and Malden, 2002). Bridging this gap will require a lot of innovative work coupled with the dedicated and active engagement of the public sector.

There are also issues raised about online interactions for people with disability in personal, public and professional contexts. People with disability most time face a lower level of education attainment and unemployment compared to others. A study carried out in USA in 2005 confirms that the Federal Government is the largest employer of labour and all applicants must apply via the World Wide Web in fact, only 3% of companies did not use the Web and online process in recruiting. The same study unfortunately confirmed that 13% of these companies were familiar with the guidelines for accessibility Web design, only 10% could confirm that their online hiring and human resource had been evaluated for accessibility. (Jaeger, 2012)

Although generally, it has been observed that these gaps are gradually closing up among various ethnic, geographical and racial group in access to internet (Compaine, 2001). This may be a direct consequence of two factors which are the decreasing costs of use and the increasing ease of use. It is strongly believed that this trend of digital divide will gradually fade away.

 

Reference

Compaine B.M (2001). The digital divide. Mit Press

Jaeger P.T (2012). Disability and the Internet. USA; Lynne Rienner Publishers

Servon L.S & Malden M.A (2002). Bridging the digital divide: technology, community and public policy. Blackwell Publishers.

A DAY IN THE DIGITAL LIFE: a critical analysis

This piece of publication examines the digital life and the implication of the users of the internet passively volunteering information in the course of accessing the web. These information are mostly picked up by commercial organisations or government and are used in building up huge correlated data.

It attempts also to explore digital footprint which is a concept that simply implies the residue of information anyone leaves as he/she accesses the web. There is an attempt to track the effect of this act of data amassment on personal identities, society and communities in UK.

As can be deduced from the article, there are no known established functional research methodologies which would provide the collection of the data surrounding digital footprints. This work acts as a preliminary study which aims at developing methods of capturing individuals digital footprints as they use the internet over a 24-hour period.

Many materials were referenced in the course of producing this article and various technology and tools were deployed in identifying these footprints. They include GPS, phone records, key-logging, video technology and direct observation of personal activities over a period of time.

Relating issues like privacy was discussed were individuals willingly allow pieces of their data to be collected which is further profiled and distributed to third parties authorised to receive these data.

The article concluded by pointing out that there is a huge concern regarding data collection and maintenance of data sets that bring together events triggered directly alongside other events that occur elsewhere away from the individual physical presence. The existences of these data sets are currently beyond the reach of conventional methodologies.        

In conclusion, it can be deduced that there are limitations in the methodologies deployed in this research, a very limited research periods and still a lot of work to be done to really develop an acceptable tool in this regard.

Reference   

Fletcher G., Griffiths M. and Kutar M.  A Day in the Digital Life: A Preliminary Sousveillance Study

Health Care Application

Hi all. The next session we had with Dr. Burke was fun and quite educative. We were engaged in group activities and asked to design a Health care application.

From the picture above, my group came up with a mobile application known as pain care. This application helps control pain, manage their symptoms and medications. This application also creates a communication with the physician.

Some other features of the application include keeping a personal pain record, record of time of treatment, internet connection to goggle maps for easy location of a hospital, keeping of treatment records, giving of alert for a favourite care team member etc.

In summary, the history of the patient and all forms of treatment previously administered is on record and could be easily retrieved especially handy during times of emergency.  

Web Accessibility; Session with Dr. David Kreps

Despite the fact that the World Wide Web (WWW) has been in existence for over a decade and despite laws being enacted to avoid discrimination of the disabled in many countries, this service remains inaccessible to a great number of these group of people. In a study carried out in UK, it was discovered that below 20% of websites meet with the standards of accessibility across various forms of disability. (Adam & Kreps, 2006)

According to (Lewthwaite, 2014), web accessibility is also regarded to be closely related to rehabilitation. The World Wide Web avails disabled people the chance and opportunity to maintain and develop their social life, education, employment, etc. Thus, accessibility to online experiences represents a crucial aspect of rehabilitation.

There have been efforts to make the World Wide Web available to all. This movement was championed by Web Access Initiative (WAI) which is the author of global guidance for accessibility. This WAI is part of the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) which is an International community that develops the open standards for the World Wide Web. This has been criticized with accusations that it is being dominated by multinationals and big companies raising issues of partial standards that protect only their interest. (Lewthwaite, 2014)

In all, developers must put into consideration different situations in designing web pages. Situations to consider must be generally beneficial to various disability groups at once and also the World Wide Web user community as a whole. The guidelines will accommodate accessibility issues and also provide accessibility design solutions. (Paciello, 2000)

Finally, (Adam & Kreps, 2006) stated that in designing and testing websites, these disabled people should be directly involved in place of automated testing. This will provide an avenue for a real and genuine step in making the World Wide Web indeed usable for all with particular emphasis on the disabled.

 

References

Adam, A.E; Kreps, D.G (2006). Web Accessibility: a digital divide for disabled people. UK: Springer Publishers

Lewthwaite, S (2014). Web accessibility standards and disability: developing critical perspectives on accessibility. An international multidisciplinary journal. Retrieved from

http://informahealthcare.com.famproxy.salford.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.3109/09638288.2014.938178

Paciello, M.G (2000). Web accessibility for People with Disabilities. USA: CMP Books

Critical Analysis of the article “Customer Management via Social Media: Case Study of Starbucks

The aim of this article is to analyse and explore the impact or effect of social media as a tool in supporting Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) in organisations particularly the ones that rely on the traditional brick-and-mortar business model.

The organisation examined or rather used as a case study in this article is Starbucks which is an international coffee house chain which has risen from humble beginnings and now expanded to over 19,000 stores spanning 59 countries.

Social media services used by Starbucks were analysed in this article. They are;

*Twitter: this is a social media service which provides micro blogging services (MBS). It allows users to publish updates or commentaries known as microposts. Starbucks uses these tweets/microposts to provide knowledge for customers and promote their latest products, events and campaigns. It also allows customers to make prompt response.

*Facebook: this social media tool provides a service known as Social Networking Service (SNS). Through this medium, Starbucks provides a wide array of knowledge for customers and also draws knowledge from customers through poll questions and assess their behaviours, expectations, preferences or levels of satisfaction.

*Foursqure: this social media tool provides a type of service known as Location aware Mobile Service (LMS). This service allows users to check in online at real world locations and receive information that are context sensitive based on their locations. Starbucks has been reported to be one of the most searched brands in foursquare. These customers often leave comments which acts as a valuable source of knowledge from customers.

*MyStarbucksIdea: this social media service is categorized as a Corporate Discussion forum Service (CDS). It provides dedicated avenues for customers to discuss issues which are organisation specific. It also provides an avenue for customers to make enquiries and offer ideas. There are also rewards for customers who contribute frequently with good ideas. Starbucks also use this medium to provide knowledge to customers about issues that are up coming, under review or launched.

The journal contains about 61 references from various other documents. These materials cut across newspapers, magazines, newswire, books, scholarly publications and social media services which are textually analysed.

Painstaking investigation has been done in this journal and random data and information collected over several platforms. Information gathered where backed up by all the materials referenced in the journal and the methodology is quite impressive and the different authors agree with the issues raised in the journal.

The constraint observed in the piece of work is the limited period over which the sample information was taken which is not too ideal for a case study as wide and complex as this.

Lecture on Context Mapping-Organisational Perspective

The first topic that we looked at with Suzanne was Context Mapping – Organisation perspective where we considered the University of Salford as the organisation.

We were required to view the institution from a student’s perspective (internal) and also from an external view (environment) putting various factors into consideration like political, economic, climate, trends, technology, customer needs and uncertainties with the aim of having a holistic view of an external business landscape .

There was a range of diverse opinions in this regard as many people made contribution on individual and group basis ranging from the quality of education being provided, the political and economic issues affecting the university, technology issues where some people expressed disappointment with the internet connection which logs you out every now and then sometimes, issues of accessibility and usability, uncertainty issues were also discussed.

After a time out/break, we had another interesting session where we were asked as a group to come up with a “how to do” blog. That is an imaginary blog that educates the viewer on how to carry out any particular task. Additionally, we were to come up with a name for the blog, the introduction, procedure for carrying out the task, etc. it was quite exciting, people came up with different ideas as usual. Blogs that could teach how to bake cake, watch movies online, checks blood pressure, etc.

Generally, I gathered from the lecture that blogs are required to meet some certain standards and also pass across a message to a particular or group of target audience while using various parameters like pictures, animations as the case may be to achieve this.