BA 471 - Research, Report and Presentation Group
Projects
General Requirements
Groups of three (3) people research a special IS topic (listed
in the course syllabus).
Each group will present an overview (15-20 minutes) of the
topic to
the class (for presentation dates, refer to the course
syllabus).
You may request the class to prepare itself for the special
topic
presentation through reading a short article or paper if and only if:
the paper/article is available on the Web;
the paper is approved by the instructor;
approval is acquired at least one week prior to the
presentation.
Each group will prepare a power point presentation to be
presented at the time scheduled in the syllabus.
Your instructor will provide feedback on the presentation within a day
or so. The powerpoint presentation must be made available
electronically to your instructor so that it can be published on the
course Web site.
Following the presentation, each group will construct a concept map of the
relevant concepts covered in the presentation. The group
will present this map to the class at the date and time scheduled in
the syllabus. The concept map must be made
available electronically to your instructor so that it can be published
on the course Web site.
The Topics
Business Intelligence. Business
Intelligence is the exploration or mining of
business data in search of meaningful patterns. Provide a brief
overview of this technology and its relevance in business and
government settings. In your presentation, make sure that you discuss
the concepts of a data warehouse and data marts.
Geographic Information Systems.
GIS or spatial information systems are becoming an
important component of business computing. However, GIS are 'special'
in that they require special database and processing technology.
Provide an introduction to GIS and its increasing relevance in business.
IT Outsourcing. Provide an
overview
of the 'outsourcing' of software development phenomenon. How big a
phenomenon
is this? Is it growing? Why? What trends can be observed? What does it
mean
for the future of Western computing?
DB Market. Who are the major
players in the database
market? At which sectors of the database market are their products
targeted?
Who is competing with whom? How big are these companies? Who owns
them? What products do they offer? What role does database software
play
in their product portfolio?
Disaster prevention and
recovery.
The laws of system entropy, natural disasters, acts of terror and
computer crime are but some of the things that can destroy
an organization's information flow and storage. Explore how companies
are
protecting themselves against these mishaps. Are the information
systems in our college and university properly protected against these
things? If not, what advise would you have to mitigate this situation?
Oracle vs. PeopleSoft. In
the Spring of 2003 Oracle Corp. initiated a hostile takeover of
PeopleSoft.
Provide an overview of this conflict and the interests involved. Why
did
Oracle want PeopleSoft? What products did PeopleSoft offer and how do
they
relate to Oracle's? What are enterprise computing and enterprise
resource
planning (ERP) systems and what were/are Oracle's and PeopleSoft's
roles in this
market? What strategies did Oracle Corp. use to convince PeopleSoft
software
users that the takeover was a 'good thing?' What is the current status
of
the conflict?
W3C. Provide an overview
of the World-Wide Web Consortium. Who are these people and what do they
do?
Who listens to them? What sort of influence do they have? What business
processes
do they follow? What is the relationship between W3C and so-called
'open
standards?'
Digital Asset Management. Digital
Library
(DL) technology provides new ways for businesses to manage their
institutional memory. Provide an overview of DL technology, some of
its implementations (e.g.,
www.NSDL.org), meta data and meta data
harvesting and briefly discuss some of its best-known products (e.g.,
Fedora and DSpace).
OSS Business Models. Provide an
overview of the various business models that have been developed around
Open Source Software.
How do companies create businesses based on something that is free and
open?
Are these business models sustainable? Do they falsify business models
based
on exclusion; e.g.,
businesses based on patents?
IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, HP and
Apple
are all technology companies. Yet each of them 'rode' the .com bust
rather differently. Provide an overview of these companies,
their products, markets and financial performance. Compare
the trajectories of their stock prices for the last 10 years or so and
try to explain the different patterns. Finally, speculate on the future
of these companies.
RFID. For some time now,
RFID has been an up and coming wireless technology. Provide an
overview of RFID technology, its promises, potential and actual uses
and
some of the more controversial issues surrounding this technology.
CRM.
Customer Relations Management (CRM) is an important component of
marketing. To support all aspects of CRM, various companies have
developed extensive suites of so-called CRM software. Provide an
overview of the functionality of these packages, their vendors (who are
the main players? e.g.,
Siebel (now Oracle)) and their impact on the management of customer
relations.
Acquiring a Web presence. How do
companies acquire a web presence? The easy --and uninteresting-- answer
would be that they buy hosting from a Web hosting company. But how does
it really work? How does your company acquire (own) its domain name?
Who sells them and who regulates them? And how do computers on the Web
find your web site? And how do Google and other search engines get to
know about your Web site? Also important: what is all of this going to
cost you? Who builds and maintains your Web pages?
XBRL or
eXtensible Business Reporting Language is a new standard for exchanging
and reporting business financial data.It is an implementation of the by now very popular and
intensively used XML or eXtensible Markup Language. Since its invention
in the late 1990s, XML has revolutionized and standardized electronic
data exchange. As a consequence, businesses can now easily share
information with each other. This has profound consequences for all
business fields including finance, accounting and most of all,
marketing.
Moore's Law "is the empirical observation made
in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for
minimum component cost doubles every 18 months. It is attributed
to Gordon E. Moore (born 1929), a co-founder of Intel." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law).
In this exercise, you'll collect performance & price data and
empirically test Moore's Law. In addition, you will test the hypothesis
that lately the speed of this trend is increasing; i.e., that the price/performance
halftime is getting shorter.
To properly target and prepare these topics, see your
instructor so he
can help you target this presentation. Also, refer to the
chapter-specific references
in your course book, use Internet search engines or use the OSU on-line bibliographic
resources
for articles and subjects.
Some specific magazines and journals you might want to consult:
