Week 4

Reflection

This weeks lecture was about enhancing business intelligence using information systems. Within this lecture I learnt ISs are used to gather and analyse information from internal and external sources to help make good business decisions that will help the business in the long run. I learnt what "Big Data" is and how it effects a business through volume, variety, velocity, veracity and value. We also looked at the different types of data that management has to require, soft data which is non-analytical information such as up to date news stories and hard data which is facts and numbers usually produced by organisational databases or other systems. Business intelligence helps when reacting to various threats and opportunities organisations may face such as fierce competition and to help organisations continuously analyse and monitor business processes to get the results to help make adjustments within the business.

We also learnt about databases and the Database Management System, or DBMS for short, this is a program that allows organisations to easily create, store, retrieve, organise and analyse information the business has retrieved. After that we learnt about the advantages of the database approach, how effective it is to a business and the types of documents that would be drawn up.

We learnt about a few other systems such as:

• Decision support systems (DSS), which is a system used to support decision making for recurring problems. This is measured through a what-if analysis which usually a employee at managerial level would complete.

• Expert systems, which is a system that manipulates knowledge rather than information. This system asks a series of questions where the answers are then matched with predefined rules. 

• Intelligent agents. This system comes in many different types such as user agents, buyer agents, monitoring and sensing agents, data-mining agents, web crawlers and destructive agents. 

The last thing I learnt in the lecture was GIS which is an acronym for geographic information systems. This is a system for creating, managing, analysing and storing geographically referenced information where a user can add information stored in different layers. an example of this could be google earth.

Teamwork

This week within our groups we asked our company a few questions to the business to get more of an insight on the company and some minor issues they would go through on a day to day basis. We collected a lot of information which we then read over in the seminar and analysed the answers to produce any solutions to these problems. This was just to help us see who was best at what job so we can then start to assign roles for the more serious solutions the business faces. 

Week 3

Reflection

This weeks lecture was about managing IS infrastructure and services. Within this lecture I learnt what the components of an IS infrastructure were. This included the hardware, software, DBs and the communications or networks and people. We then went into more detail of these components. I learnt some examples of the type of hardware that would be seen on a day to day basis within a business, what they are used for, how many users would be using the type of hardware and what they would roughly cost on today's market. We then went on to talk more about system software and application software. I learnt that the difference between systems software and application software is system software operates the computer and application software deals more with performing user tasks. 

Our lecturer then went on to tell us more about networking and the different types of computer networking there are. Some examples of these include; PBX, PAN, LAN, WAN, etc. This was something I had not learned about before therefore it was very informative. Next my lecturer explained the internet and the world wide web to us, what they were and why we use them. 

Another very informative subject we covered was storage needs and space and facility requirements. This covered how much storage and space a business needs as business collect and analyse vast amounts of data. It also explained the servers that business need to use on a day to day basis and how expensive it can be to run these servers.

In this weeks seminar we learnt how to use excel in more detail by making a time-sheet with the formulas we have been learning throughout the past 2 weeks. This will help in the future to make quick sums and analyse data.

Teamwork

In this weeks seminar our group came up with more effective questions based on the answers we got from our first set of questions we came up with last week, these will help us get a deeper understanding of the businesses problems. As a member of our group was absent we did not get the chance to assign each person a role so we decided we will do that the following week. We may be meeting outside of classes to discuss the project even further and to keep Lauren up to date with what is happening as she was absent. 

Week 2

Reflection

This weeks lecture was on reflective writing, we learnt what it was and why it is important to do it. Reflective writing is an examination of ourselves and our actions. I learnt what was to be considered when writing reflectively as it is important to write only key points. I also learnt that reflective writing helps to develop a better understanding, helps us learn more and helps develop more skills. Our lecturer spoke about Borton's 3 Elements, a theory that helps when reflective writing. It focuses the three questions, What? So what? and Now what? This will help my reflective writing to be more descriptive and it backs up the information using related theories. The last point 'Now what?' helps on what I could do next time so I can improve my quality of work.

I also learnt the focused free writing technique, a technique that helps me to start thinking about something more freely. There are different steps to this technique, the first being to reflect on an incident, experience or process, write for 15 minutes without stopping not worrying about grammar or spelling then skim through the work and pick out any information that could be useful for my work.

Teamwork

Today in the seminar, my team brought together all of our findings from our Japan Tobacco International research task. This really helped us get a good idea of what the business was, how it runs and what possible problems they may face.We then thought about possible questions we could ask the business to find out more about the company internally through their employees. We then would ask more questions about what problems they may face on a daily bases due to technological problems. This will give us a better understanding of the problems within the business so we can come up with solutions as a team. As a team we discussed that Chloe will ask the questions to the employee as she knows people within the business so she will then reflect back to us the problems the business faces. We will then assess the problems, find out which problems we want to solve, set each member of the team a task to do and come up with a solution.

Week 1 

Reflection

In the lecture our lecturer outlined what the final grade of this semester will depend on, what the coursework is, how the coursework is going to be marked and talked us through the module guide. In our seminar we did an introduction to the module in more depth and then created our consultancy groups, picked our business for the assignment then created this very blog to blog each week of the assignment. These blog entries will have information on how we worked as a teamwork and the work that we did that week.

Teamwork 

For our first week in our second semester we have been given an assignment which is based on a live business of our choice then get in a group of 4-5 people to research the company, find out if they have any problems, analyse the problems and give feedback and solutions to the business to help overcome these problems. In the seminar me and my three other teammates Jessica, Lauren and Chloe got into a group and decided to do our assignment on JTI (Japan Tobacco International) as Chloe's father is highly ranked in the business so we can obtain the information we need to analyse and come up with a solution to the company problems. We came up with a company name which is Kinetic Consultancies, we thought this suited our group as it shows we are willing to work as a team and it sounded professional. Lauren, Jessica and I do not know much about the company so we are having to research the company while Chloe finds out a little bit more about the company to report back to us so we have more detailed information about the company. Next week we have decided to assign roles to start collecting, analysing and comping up with possible solutions to the companies problems.