Chapter 4,5 and 6 Information Technology

 

CHAPTER 4

 

Ethical and social issues in information systems refers to the principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behaviors while the information ethics is a branch of ethics that focuses on the relationship between the creation, organization, dissemination, and use of information, and the ethical standards and moral codes governing human conduct in society, Information systems raise new ethical questions for both individuals and societies because they create opportunities for intense social change and thus threaten existing distribution of power, money, rights and obligations for example other technologies, such as steam engines, electricity, the telephone and the radio, information technology can be used to achieve social progress, but it can also be used to commit crimes and threaten cherished social values in that case the development of information technology will produce benefits for many and costs for others.

 

The Ethical issues in information systems have been given new urgency by the rise of the internet and electronic commerce, the Internet and digital firm technologies has made it easier than ever to assemble, integrate, and distribute information, unleashing new concerns about the appropriate use of customer information, the protection of personal confidentiality and the protection of intellectual property and other pressing ethical issues raised by information systems including establishing accountability for the consequences of information systems, setting standards to safeguard system quality that protects the safety of individual and society and preserving values and institutions considered essential to the quality of life in an information society.

 

My personal point of view

 

 It is very important to find out how ethics has been very beneficial in today’s daily activities in decisions applied and solutions to situations involving information provision and which reflect to an organization’s commitment to responsible information services involving information formats and needs require continual reconsideration of ethical principles and how these codes are applied. Considerations regarding information ethics influence personal decisions, professional practice and public policy.

 

As a matter of fact, changes in technology often affect the society for example it change individuals, jobs, education, government and social interactions which make up a society, each group has rights and responsibilities to one another, such as right to privacy and obligations regarding ethics.

 

The effect of technology on individuals can be beneficial or harmful but in most cases the modification in technology may help a group of individuals and be destructive to another set of people the usual challenges include loss of privacy, depersonalization and change in incentives, the benefits include lower prices, better products and services.

 

 Many of these issues does not only affect our society as a whole, but also raise lots of questions for organizations and our working place at large, therefore ethical analysis must provide a framework to take into consideration many diverse domains regarding how information is distributed and whoever violates the law be it a manager or junior employee will be convicted and will most likely spend time in prison for committing the kind of offence.

 

www.academia.edu/.../Ethics_and_Social_Impact_of_Information_Syste..

galletta.business.pitt.edu/amcis2003/05ITMGT8_SocialIssues.htm

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_ethics

 

CHAPTER 5

 

IT Information and Emerging Technologies

 

An IT infrastructure consists of a set of physical devices of hardware, software, network resources and services required for the existence, operation and management of an enterprise comprising of both human and technical capabilities in IT environment.

 It allows an organization to deliver IT solutions and services to its employees, partners and customers and is usually internal to an organization and deployed within owned facilities.

 

The IT infrastructure in organizations today is an outgrowth of over 50 years of evolution in computing platforms. There have been five stages in this evolution, each representing a different configuration of computing power and infrastructure elements.

 Five eras are generally purpose mainframe and minicomputer computing, personal computer, clients/server networks, enterprise computing and cloud and mobile computing.

 

Technologies that characterize one era may also be used in another time period for other purposes, some companies still run traditional mainframe systems or use mainframe computers as massive servers supporting large web sites and corporate enterprise applications.

 

The contemporary hardware Platform Trends, while the cost of computing has fallen, IT infrastructure expenditures have grown due to the rising cost of computing services, software, and the increase in intensity and sophistication of computing, the telecommunications and computing platforms have converged at the client level, with the merging of PDAs and cell phones, and at the server and network level, with the rise of Internet telephony.

The grid computing utilizes the idle computational resources of separate, geographically remote computers to create a single virtual supercomputer. In this process, a server computer breaks data and applications into discrete chunks that are parceled out to the grid's machines in that case the  grid computing offers increased cost savings, computational speed and agility.

High usage of computer demand will refer to firms offloading high peak demand for computing power to remote, large scale data processing centers. This allows firms to reduce their investment in IT infrastructure by investing in only as much computing power as needed on average and paying for additional power on an as-needed basis. This arrangement offers firms much greater agility and flexibility in their infrastructure.

Autonomic computing is an industry-wide effort to develop systems that can configure, optimize, repair, and protect themselves against intruders and viruses, in an effort to free system administrators from routine system management, reduce costly system crashes. Today's virus software with automatic virus updates is one example of autonomic computing.

The edge in computing is a multi-tier, load-balancing scheme for Web-based applications in which parts of the Web site content and processing are performed by smaller, less expensive servers located near the computer.

 

 In an edge computing platform client requests are initially processed by the edge servers, which may deliver static presentation content, reusable code, while database and business logic components are delivered by the enterprise servers

 

Personal point of view

 

I have learnt that Information technology benefits the business world by allowing organizations to work more efficiently and to maximize productivity putting in place Faster communication, electronic storage and the protection of records are the greatest advantages that IT can have on your enterprise.

 

Information technology creates electronic storage systems to protect your company's valuable records and secure maintenance of customer and patient files, it is also vital to business integrity Storage systems such as virtual vaults which keeps information safe by only allowing certain users within your company to access, withdraw, add or change the documents In business i discovered that what actually people look for is ways to do more work in a shorter period of time an also found out that Information technology has to do with computer applications on which nearly every work environment is dependent and since computerized systems are so widely used, it is advantageous to incorporate information technology into your organization to acquire all these benefits and enhancing your business or firm to grow by excessive usage of technology.

smallbusiness.chron.com › ... › InformationTechnology

 

CHAPTER 6

 

Foundations of Business Intelligence, Databases and Information Management

 

Are effective information systems that provide users with accurate, timely and relevant information and is free of errors. Information is timely when it is available decision makers when it is needed. Information is relevant when it is useful and appropriate for the types of work and decisions that require it.

 

Business doesn’t have timely accurate or relevant information because the data in their information systems have been poorly organized and maintained. That’s why data management is so essential to understand the problem they look at, how information systems arrange data in the computer files and traditional methods of file management.

Therefore a computer system organizes data in a hierarchy that starts with bits and bytes and progresses to fields, records, files, and databases. Abit represents the smallest unit of data a computer can handle.

 

A group of bits, is called a byte, represents a single character which can be a letter, a number or another symbol. Grouping of characters into a word, a group of words or a complete number is called field. A group of related fields such as the students name, the course taken, the date and the grade, comprises a record, a group of records of the same type is called a file, in other words a group of related files makes up a database.

An entity is a person, place, thing, or event on which we store and maintain information. Each characteristic or quality describing a particular entity is called an attribute, for example a student’s ID course, date and grade are attributes of the entity course. The specific values that these attributes can have are found in the fields of the record describing the entity course.

 

Business institutions use their databases to keep basic transactions such as paying suppliers, processing orders, keeping track of customers and paying employees but they also need databases to provide information that will help the company run the business more efficiently and help managers and employees make better decisions and if a company wants to know which product is the most popular or who is its most profitable customer.

 

 Personal point of view

 

I come to conclude that an effective information system provides users with accurate, timely, and relevant information, the accurate information is a free of error and Information is timely when it is available to decision makers when it is needed in an organization, computer systems organizes data in a hierarchy that starts with bits and bytes and progresses to fields, records, file and database.

 In most organizations, systems tended to grow independently without a company-wide plan like in accounting, finance, manufacturing, human resources, and sales and marketing all developed their own systems and data files.