Illustration Of Two Online Tracking Software Applications

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Information systems: foundations of eBusiness

Basharath Ali

Student Number (120241949)

Disclaimer

This material is based upon work supported by University of London, Goldsmith. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations are those of the authors and do not reflect the views on University of London, Goldsmith College, its employees or its administration.

Table of Contents

Executive Summary

The purpose of this report was designed to examine the ethical issues of deploying an employee tracking system into STAR, and the order of implementing the various information systems with respect to the value with they might create, and the procedural which STAR might adopt to implement the systems and utmost, an example of a webpage in which managers of STAR would use to deduce information from customers.

Introduction / Background

STAR ballet shoes organization produced ballet shoes for its internal local area only. And for it to climb to the global market, it needs something special, something in the form of a ladder, which could help STAR to make a trademark and also distinguish itself from the other potential similar minded companies.

And that ladder would be advised in the form of information systems which would be putted in the latter part of this report. However there are consequences of implementing such superior systems to the organization which is classified both in the organization and also in the arena of the global market.

The challenges which STAR would face in the outer field of the organization itself would be of minimal effects but tackling the ethics from the organization walls itself is the hardest out of all.

Also, the development of such systems should also take a certain order paying closer attention to which system might bring in greater value and implementing such a system with priority. And the protocol approach of implementing the systems has been discussed as follows.

With nothing much left to say, let us pay a closer view to those issues of STAR which needs to be addressed.

1. Ethical Matters

In the earlier introductory context, it was mentioned that STAR might face some challenges which was briefly stated but in this segment, the challenges arising from the internal walls of the organization would be closely looked into. To address that challenges, we would look at one aspect of such internal issue.

One of the major issues within the organization would be ethics. Whether it's proper ethics or improper ones, when two employees with different ethical views work, clashes might occur. For STAR, it's trying to bring up Information Systems into its organization and if the employees don't like that concept, ethical issues might occur. As such, the upbringings of the ethical decision of STAR on its employees shall be discussed in the following paragraphs.

1.1 Illustration of two online tracking software applications

Let us begin with a simple factual illustration first. A Massachusetts-based security firm came out with a system which is capable of tracking people's daily activities via social media from which they login and utilize. And this firm uses NORA technology (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012) which is popularly known as the Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness technology to scan and capture all of the information from the different aspects of social media and, create a profile for each and every entity. Through this, this software known as Riot in short, would serve any purpose exclusively of tracking for employees' movement even outside of the organization. However, this application software was quite advanced in the sense that it tracks for the employees' activities even outside of the workplace keeping a close attention of what they do and where they go. With this, common traits of employees could be captured and suspicious activities could be easily sensed (Gallagher, 2013).

However, there's a simple low effort and simple software which could be used to track for employee's activities in the workplace only. And that's known as ArtivTrak. This application does less job than what the previous Riot did. For example, ArtivTrak keeps track of the webpages, applications which the employee is using and charts a table to let the administrator view of what has been happening for the past week or month (Activtrak, 2013).

1.2 Ethical decision

With that information tracked by the software applications, it might seem to be legitimate and totally ethical to use this system. However, it does come with some issues as it's clearly evident that the employee's privacy is invoked. When we talk about issues, there are two sides to it, one is the employees' argument and the other is the organization's views on it. Before coming to a proper decision, let's analyze them in detail.

1.2.1 STAR's point of view

Utmost, STAR wants to learn of any possible resistance or activities which might bring its image down as a global company. Therefore STAR would need to analyze and scan its employees' activities to keep itself free from any possible sabotage of its image (D. Loch, 1998).

However, overusing the power of NORA system could likably result in the unhappiness of its employees. Understanding the cause of the unhappiness of the employees could ease this (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012).

1.2.2 Employees' point of view

Employees also have their arguments standing up against this system which might affect them morally and ethically (D. Loch, 1998). The top few ones are illustrated below.

A brief summarized list of issues which causes unhappiness to the employees:

No freedom

Employer's trust level on employees causes an impact (American Management Association, 2005)

Low morale (American Management Association, 2005)

Invasion of privacy (Miller, 2000)

Flexibility of performing a certain task

1.2.3 Concluded possible ethical decision

Now with those reasons by both sides of the parties, we could easily sense that STAR's arguments are legitimate and be accepted to be implemented provided STAR promises not to interrupt the daily operations of its employees and only using that system to scan for vulnerabilities which might possibly affect STAR.

However, it's still not ethical for STAR if it started this system without any prior notice to its employees or discussing its policies to its employees. And STAR must not cross over its limits of monitoring its employees which might affect their employee's social relationships with their family or friends.

If the above conditions are met, then it would be stated that it's ethical for STAR to implement such a tracking system on its employees.

2. The three dimensions of the linking systems

Implementing a "Tracking system" would be a waste if there are absolutely no primary assets to protect the company from the employees. "No primary assets" refers to the actual systems which the company currently holds.

Up to date, STAR had no automated information systems to guide it through the global market and three systems would be strongly advised for its international growth. Those would be Enterprise Resource Planning, Supplier Chain Management and Customer Relationship Management systems (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012). However, STAR can't implement all of the three systems at one go, which might bring hassle or it would be a cost-driving factor to STAR and, therefore one-at-a time system implementation would be suggested. And this segment would go through the systems which would be suggested to be implemented in a specific order as for STAR to see a higher chance of grabbing into the Global Market easily.

2.1 Understanding the three systems

Before a sequence of systems that could be suggested to be implemented, let's understand each and every system. (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012)

Enterprise Resource Planning, also known as ERP in short would be used within an organization to facilitate cross-functional departmental activities over a single task.

Supplier Chain Management, also known as SCM would be used to automate the relationships with its suppliers with keeping in note, that the sourcing for the organization would be automated in the sense that the supplies would be replenished automatically without calling in for any time-to-time.

Now, coming to Customer Relationship Management, which is popularly known as CRM is used to automate the management of relationships with the organization's customers.

With understanding all of those systems, let's analyze on a possible prioritized combination of suitable systems integration order which might boost the capital of STAR.

2.2 Possible priority system

2.2.1 Customer Relationship Management System

At first, STAR might want to grab its customers from the global market and for it to do so; it would need to market itself through advertising and vice versa. But CRM doesn't even make up the marketing portion and, what it simply does is that it just maintains and strengthens the relationship between the customers and the STAR itself. As a result, the relationship part would be of total useless if customers themselves weren't there (Raab, 2008).

2.2.2 Supplier Chain Management System

As seen from the case study's context, it's quite evident that STAR already had a certain kind of menial SCM system in their local Leeds area. With STAR expanding into the global market, it won't immediately invest in an outsourced factory or end up getting supplies from an external country unless it had some level of experience in the global marketing arena and businesses (T. Mentzer, 2001). Therefore, SCM might be kicked off as the starting piece from the jigsaw puzzle.

2.2.3 Enterprise Resource Management System

With stepping into the global market, STAR might be getting more enquiries, feedback, and in short it would need to handle more customers than ever from the global arena. More companies would be competing in this area and if only STAR could handle its customers efficiently, it's not a doubt that STAR might get a bigger bite of its globalization efforts.

In order to facilitate this, STAR might want to fine-tune its internal organizational activities to serve its customers well (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012). For example, STAR would need to know the specific area where its ballet shoes are popularly been sold so that it might focus on that area to market and sell its shoes.

With these, let's take a view at the possible systems' integration where it might bring in greater revenue to STAR.

2.2.4 Advised possible systems' integration

Let's put the possible order which is most suitable for STAR in a diagram to visualize this.

FIGURE 1 - "Possible Integration Order of Information Systems"

Firstly, Enterprise Resource Planning system is suggested utmost followed by the Supplier Chain Management System and then linked to the Customer Relationship Management system. Now, let's briefly explore the concept for this order.

As mentioned above, STAR is trying to making a leap to the global market from the local one, but prior to that, it should understand that its internal operations should be automated (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012) across many of its departments to serve its customers and handle them well.

Upon that, it should get its supplies ready and up to date to serve its customers with the products. Without supplies, there would be no products, which would yield in no customers too. And to handle that, Supplier Chain Management system would be greatly required.

As for a final note, STAR is just doing a shoe business and there's not a clear need of collating customers' information in detail. As such, the kind of information which STAR might be interested in could be the general ones such as the area which the shoes are been sold and vice versa. As a result, CRM doesn't play an important role and therefore kept as a last system to be implemented.

As such, I would strongly suggest that STAR should implement the Information Systems in this order which are ERP, SCM followed by CRM.

3. Methodologies to be used on STAR's systems

With the order of the Information systems being finalized, now we could look into the ways where STAR could build them. Prior to that, STAR would need to design and model those systems in a virtual manner so that it could provide STAR a better picture of how to create those systems. As such, there are two methodologies of designing and modeling the systems which are popularly known as the object oriented and the traditional structured approaches (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012). Either one of these approaches could be efficiently applied to the case of STAR. Prior to that, we would look into the proper definition of each methodology and study them closely in the following paragraph.

3.1 Traditional structured approach

The oldest approach known as the traditional structured approach pays a close attention to the processes rather than the data which is being transacted (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012). In this case of STAR, the discrete information which the organization might be interested is just purely the general information such as the most popularly selling area and vice versa as previously mentioned in this report. However the interlinking processes are the ones which make up STAR as a whole working organization. Therefore, another approach might answer that and it's mentioned below in the following segment.

3.2 Object-orientated approach

Tackling both the processes and the data associated with the processes itself would be super tedious in the sense both the data and the processes needs to be coordinated. However, another methodology could solve this which is known as Object oriented approach. This methodology couples both data and the processes in an object kind of manner and focuses on that particular object as an entity. In the situation of STAR's cross-functional processes, its departments would have to interact with each and every department and, also pass information within itself. As a result, processes would need to be dependent on the data. (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012) With this, let's take a closer view on the positive and negative effects of each approach as follows.

3.3 Suggested methodology

Just like a coin's two sides, both the approaches have its own pros and cons and, we shall try to relate those pros and cons to STAR's focus of business etiquettes to find the best approach.

Before looking into the benefits of each approach against STAR, let's visualize the integration of the systems in a diagrammatic form.

FIGURE 2 - "Integration of the ERP, SCM and CRM systems into STAR"From the figure two, we would need to analyze whether the systems are coordinated to focus on the processes or the data. And to relate from the figure, customers' data is often kept by STAR and this piece of datum would play a crucial role in the creation of this systems. Let us go through an example to better understand what is meant by the usefulness of the datum. As STAR is going global, we might assume that data is somehow important for STAR to analyze where are the popular sales going on for its products (Li, 2009). As such, STAR might want to focus on that primary area or country to maximize its sales. However, the key processes are also vital for STAR's survival such as getting the supplies, making the shoes, marketing them and selling them to the correct customers at the right time. Hence, it's evident that data is equally important so as the processes.

Therefore, it's clearly evident that the best approach which could be applied is object orientated. But let's contradict STAR with the traditional structured approach upfront. To visualize from the figure two, data in the form of customer's information plays an important role and with the use of the traditional structure approach, one might find it difficult to cultivate and maintain two different flow diagrams for both the datum and the processes individually (Li, 2009). And this promotes tediousness. To avoid such an issue, object orientated would seem to be a better option where both the datum and processes would be coordinated to form a better linkage of systems singularly.

4. Transacting the datum amongst the departments

As discussed in the earlier segment, transacting the datum is a very important requirement for the cross functional activities to take place efficiently. To transact such data, many different kinds of middle layer platforms would be discretely advised in the form of a webpage for ease of access (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012). And as such, the kind of information which would be transacted through this webpage would be discussed below.

4.1 Requirements and guidelines of the webpage

It might be a dazzle to think what kind of information the management of STAR might be interested in. To think thoroughly, it's very well known that STAR might potentially be interested in the customer's buying trends, customer's dissatisfactions and feedback, and customer's wants and needs to say in brief (Ward, 2013). And the webpage should be able to capture all of that information and display it on the webpage for the management to view it and act upon it. Not only that, the webpage must be able to assist the management to analyze STAR's products and provide them with up to date information through a very well known method known as online analytical processing (OLAP) (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012). In the following segment, the structure and the function of the webpage would be stated alongside with a screenshot of that typical webpage.

4.2 Functions and structure of the webpage

Developing a webpage isn't a great deal for most of the organizations and all it takes, is just a basic notepad and the necessary scripting languages in order to create one. However, understanding what a webpage would need to do, and getting its structure right would be the important elements of a successful webpage creation.

From STAR management's point of view, the webpage should be able to pull out the data from the database which contains the customers' information related to the products (Peppers, 2011). And this datum should be converted to useful information and summarized to provide a clear graphical view of how the goods are popularly sold in a certain area and so on. In the next segment, a sample webpage had been displayed in a snapshot form.

4.3 Example and desciption of a webpage

FIGURE 3 - "Snapshot of a typical webpage" - Developed with the help of wix.com

C:\Users\USER\Desktop\Picture1.png

The above snapshot showcases the template of the webpage where the users would be allowed to order for shoes via the webpage portal and also, interact with STAR directly on custom orders and feedback.

The webpage would allow the users to interact with STAR with regardless of national boundaries via web 2.0 technological tools which would cut down costs for STAR as well. Furthermore, the webpage would collect the customer feedback with the traditional method embedded in its webpage itself. Not only counting for that, the webpage would allow the customers to call in for assistance and vice versa.

With all of that information collected, STAR could possibly collate and use the previously mentioned OLAP method (C. Laudon & P. Laudon, 2012) on it to analyze the sales and promote them accordingly.

However, the important function of this webpage should be addressed in common simple terms. Most customers would be interested only in getting information from STAR's webpage related to the products, and STAR would need to maximize its gathering of its information as much as from the customer's usage of the webpage. And to solve that issue, a shopping cart was said to be implemented in the webpage which would drive more customers to the webpage in the sense, the location of the customers could be easily tracked via IP address means with respect to the location. As such, this webpage would be discretely suggested for STAR.

Conclusion and Recommendations

Throughout this report, STAR is trying to protect one particular entity and coming up with different employee tracking system to protect that entity. Furthermore it's coming up with methodologies to build upon the communication systems to transmit that entity only. And also, it's discussing on the webpage to obtain that entity from the relevant parties which made it very obvious of what's that entity it all about.

That entity is actually the customers' discrete data been stacked together to produce one single database which could be analyzed in different angles to get different outputs. With such, the STAR's greatest asset in the global market would be potentially its customers' data.