Mobile commerce

The simplest way to describe mobile commerce would be the buying and selling of products –
or the conduct of commercial transactions and activities – through telecommunication and
other mobile devices that run or operate on wireless network technologies. It is safe to say that
m-commerce is an upgraded version of e-commerce. In fact, m-commerce has been defined as
the conduct of e-commerce activities using mobile or cellular devices. If business transactions
involve the use of wireless telecommunication networks, then it is highly likely to fall under
m-commerce. While terminologies such as internet banking, electronic money transfers and
online shopping were very exciting and phenomenal in the past decade, what excites consumers
now is mobile banking, money transfer via mobile and mobile bookings among many others.

Unique Features of M-Commerce

In order to fully understand what sets mobile commerce apart from e-commerce and m-
business, it is a good idea to take a look at its unique features, which can be clearly seen in its
advantages.

Mobility and ubiquity

Mobile commerce involves the use of portable mobile or cellular devices, such as mobile
phones, smartphones and tablets.
Portability results in closer proximity between businesses and their consumers, meaning it is
now possible for businesses to reach their target audience faster. The parties are not restricted
by physical or geographical locations when doing commerce, be it purchasing a product,
completing a bank transaction, or even bidding on an auction. In addition, the technology and
devices that power mobile commerce are also available and readily accessible. As such, the
probability of the businesses making a sale is also higher.

Electricity requirement
In e-commerce, a constant connection to an electric outlet is mandatory to power the devices.
Thanks to the increased usage and flexibility of mobile devices which come with their own
batteries, shopping via mobile devices is possible even without electricity.

Comfort, convenience and spontaneity

Many people prefer making their purchases over their desktop or laptop computers, in the
comfort of their own homes or offices, instead of making that trip to the physical store or
location of the goods or services that they want to buy.
However, there are even more people who find it more convenient to do their shopping on their
mobile phones, and they can do this while sipping some latte at a coffee shop or even in a bus
or train as they travel. There is no need to rush home or to the office to access the computer in
order to buy something. All users have to do is whip out their tablets of phones and do their
shopping from there.
USES OF MOBILE COMMERCE
Aside from making purchases through apps on mobile devices, other m-commerce examples
include purchase of ringtones, games and music online. Mobile ticket bookings and mobile
parking meter payments are also m-commerce applications. While large purchases, such as
purchase of real estate and automobiles, are still being worked on, there is no doubt that there
will soon come a time when these major transactions may also be completed on mobile devices.
The most common products and services on mobile commerce that are seen today are:
● Mobile banking. Inquire about your bank balance, manage your bank accounts, remit
money and transact with your bank through your mobile phone.
● Mobile browsing and purchase. Shopping can now be done on your mobile device
and if something catches your eye, you can immediately purchase it while browsing.
This is made faster and easier if the merchant has an app, instead of browsing their
website on your phone.
● Mobile content purchase and delivery. This is no longer a new concept, since this is
one of the earliest forms of mobile commerce. You can purchase mobile content such
as music, games, movies, ringtones, wallpapers and even apps, and they will be sent
directly to your mobile phone.
● Mobile ATM. Automated Teller Machine (ATM) transactions, specifically, cash-in
and cash-out transactions, are now considered for widespread mobile application. At
present, only a select countries and mobile companies (such as Hungary’s Vodafone)
allow the payment – through cash or bank card – of phone bills.
● Mobile money transfers. Now, money can be transferred through the use of mobile
devices.
● Information and location-based services. Sometimes users may not necessarily want
to purchase anything, but they would still be interested in receiving information, such
as news, local weather, stock and financial quotes, movie and TV programming
schedules, traffic reports and even sports scores.
● Mobile advertising. People check their mobile phones more often than they do their
desktop computers, so marketers and advertisers believe that they will be able to catch
the attention of their target consumers better if they send the promotional and marketing
materials directly to them through their mobile devices.
● Mobile ticketing, vouchers and coupons. Tickets, vouchers, coupons and even loyalty
cards are now sent to users on their mobile phones. Since they are in digital form, all
that is required would be to present these tickets, vouchers or cards, in order to get the
service or benefits that they entail.

Mobile commerce may be conducted using a mobile phone, a smartphone, a tablet, a phablet,
a notebook or, in some cases, a laptop. Basically, any device that has these two features may
be used to support mobile commerce:
● Portable and mobile
● Has the ability to gain access to a network
When we speak of mobile commerce, the first devices that come to mind are mobile phones.
Mobile devices, as a whole, are known for their ubiquity, identifiability, and context
awareness. In other words, mobile device users can access the resources that they need from
practically anywhere. There are a number of reasons why more users prefer using mobile
devices in transactions and commercial activities.
● Mobile devices improve efficiency. The use of mobile devices will reduce the costs
usually associated with the delivery of goods and services, such as warehousing and
storage costs and the cost of maintaining physical locations and stores of businesses.
● Mobile devices promote timeliness. If you have a mobile device, transactions may be
done in real-time, and this also spurs the businesses to get right away to fulfil their end
of the transaction.
● Mobile devices improve communications and relationships between the parties
involved. The instant connection made through mobile devices results in better
relations between businesses and their suppliers, sellers, customers and distributors. It
also cuts through the time (and costs) that would have been used or spent on dealing
with middlemen, since communication is done directly. Customer loyalty and retention
are also strengthened.
● Mobile devices offer a wider “reach”. From the looks of things, the use of mobile
devices is not a passing trend. In fact, we can see it playing an even bigger role in
business in the future, and so we expect more businesses to adopt mobile commerce, if
only to be able to enter bigger markets and reach a wider target audience.
.

Social Dynamics of the Internet

The internet has been associated with social changes in government, business, research, and
many other areas of everyday life. Moreover, in the short time in which it has been in
widespread use, the technology itself has changed rapidly. The Internet was initially mainly
used for communication via email, but with the Web it has, among things, also become a vast
repository of online information. This transformation is still incomplete: the embedding of the
Internet in other technologies such as digital television and mobile phones is still on going.
Nevertheless, throughout the developed world, the Internet and related information and
communication technologies have already become a well-established and integral part of social
life.
Research on the social implications of the Internet is still at an early stage, but there are already
some key insights. There are major findings to date within several social science disciplines,
including communication studies, sociology, and political science. We need to identify the
overlaps and divergences among different research approaches. For all the people who come
from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, we need to provide a common grounding in
research on the Internet, its social shaping and impact. It will also introduce some of the main
theoretical traditions in the social sciences and assess their strengths and limitations in relation
to analyzing the Internet.
The debates about the social implications of the Internet have focused on the digital divide,
potential for e-government and social mobilization, distributed work, impact on economic
growth and commerce, and governance and regulation of the Internet. Within these topics,
debate has often tended towards extremes, claiming revolutionizing effects of the Internet or
arguing that little if anything is changed by the technology. There has also been a tendency to
highlight the utopian and dystopian effects in a one-sided way. There is a need to go beyond
these extremes and identify which research agendas have yielded the most promising results
and are based on the strongest evidence.

Q4. Explain business intelligence technique, how does it support while taking decisions?
Ans:

“Business intelligence (BI)” is a term used by hardware and software vendors and information
technology consultants to describe the infrastructure for warehousing, integrating, reporting,
and analyzing data that comes from the business environment, including big data. The
foundation infrastructure collects, stores, cleans, and makes relevant information available to
managers. “Business analytics (BA)” is also a vendor defined term that focuses more on tools
and techniques for analyzing and understanding data.
So, stripped to its essentials, business intelligence and analytics are about integrating all the
information streams produced by a firm into a single, coherent enterprise-wide set of data, and
then, using modeling, statistical analysis tools (like normal distributions, correlation and
regression analysis, Chi square analysis, forecasting, and cluster analysis), and data mining
tools (pattern discovery and machine learning), to make sense out of all these data so managers
can make better decisions and better plans, or at least know quickly when their firms are failing
to meet planned targets.

Characteristics of BIS
● It is created by procuring data and information for use in decision-making.
● It is a combination of skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices.
● It contains background data along with the reporting tools.
● It is a combination of a set of concepts and methods strengthened by fact-based support
systems.
● It is an extension of Executive Support System or Executive Information System.
● It collects, integrates, stores, analyzes, and provides access to business information
● It is an environment in which business users get reliable, secure, consistent,
comprehensible, easily manipulated and timely information.
● It provides business insights that lead to better, faster, more relevant decisions.

Benefits of BIS
● Improved Management Processes.
● Planning, controlling, measuring and/or applying changes that results in increased
revenues and reduced costs.
● Improved business operations.
● Fraud detection, order processing, purchasing that results in increased revenues and
reduced costs.
● Intelligent prediction of future.

Approaches of BIS
For most companies, it is not possible to implement a proactive business intelligence system at
one go. The following techniques and methodologies could be taken as approaches to BIS:
● Improving reporting and analytical capabilities
● Using scorecards and dashboards
● Enterprise Reporting
● On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) Analysis
● Advanced and Predictive Analysis
● Alerts and Proactive Notification
● Automated generation of reports with user subscriptions and "alerts" to problems and/or
opportunities.

Techniques Used in BI
Data Visualization
When data is stored as a set or matrix of numbers, it is precise but difficult to interpret. For
example, are sales going up, down or holding steady? When looking at more than one
dimension of the data, this becomes even harder. Hence the visualization of data in charts is a
convenient way to immediately understand how to interpret the data.
Data Mining
Data mining is a computer supported method to reveal previously unknown or unnoticed
relations among data entities. Data mining techniques are used in a myriad of ways: shopping
basket analysis, measurement of products consumers buy together in order to promote other
products; in the banking sector, client risk assessment is used to evaluate whether the client is
likely to pay back the loan based on historical data; in the insurance sector, fraud detection
based on behavioral and historical data; in medicine and health, analysis of complications
and/or common diseases may help to reduce the risk of cross infections.
Reporting
Design, schedule and generation of the performance, sales, reconciliation and savings reports
is an area where BI tools help business users. Reports output by BI tools efficiently gather and
present information to support the management, planning and decision-making process. Once
the report is designed it can be automatically send to a predefined distribution list in the
required form presenting daily/weekly/monthly statistics.
Time-series Analysis Including (Predictive Techniques)
Nearly all data warehouses and all enterprise data have a time dimension. For example, product
sales, phone calls, patient hospitalizations, etc. It is extremely important to reveal the changes
in user behavior in time, relation between products, or changes in sale contracts based on
marketing promotion. Based on the historical data, we may also endeavor to predict future
trends or outcomes.
On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP)
OLAP is best known for the OLAP-cubes which provide a visualization of multidimensional
data. OLAP cubes display dimensions on the cube edges (e.g. time, product, customer type,
customer age etc.). The values in the cube represent the measured facts (e.g. value of contracts,
number of sold products etc.). The user can navigate through OLAP cubes using drill-up, -
down and -across features. The drill-up functionality enables the user to easily zoom out to
more coarse-grained details. Conversely, drill-down displays the information with more
details. Finally, drilling-across means that the user can navigate to another OLAP cube to see
the relations on another dimension(s). All the functionality is provided in real-time.
Statistical Analysis
Statistical analysis uses the mathematic foundations to qualify the significance and reliability
of the observed relations. The most interesting features are distribution analysis, confidence
intervals (for example for changes in user behaviours, etc.). Statistical analysis is used for
devising and analyzing the results from data mining.
Q5. Explain business analytics and business intelligence.
Ans: As with all concepts in business-related technologies, business intelligence has evolved
from Dresner’s original definition focusing on concepts and methods to a more action-oriented
approach referred to as business analytics. Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills,
technologies, applications, and practices applied to a continuous iterative exploration and
investigation of a business’s historical performance to gain insight and drive the strategic
business planning process. Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and
understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods. In contrast,
business intelligence traditionally focuses on using a consistent set of metrics to both measure
past performance and guide business planning, which is also based on data and statistical
methods.
Business analytics makes much more extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis,
explanatory and predictive modeling, and fact-based management to drive decision making.
Analytics may be used as input for human decisions or may drive fully automated decisions.
Business intelligence is more associated with querying, reporting, online analytical processing
(OLAP), and “alerts.” In other words, querying, reporting, OLAP, and alert tools can answer
the questions: what happened; how many; how often; where; where exactly the problem is; and
what actions are needed. Business analytics, in contrast, can answer the questions: why this is
happening; what if these trends continue; what will happen next (that is, predict); and what is
the best that can happen (that is, optimize). One of the most common techniques and
approaches associated with business analytics is data mining.

Types of analytics
● Decision Analytics: supports human decisions with visual analytics that the user models
to reflect reasoning.
● Descriptive Analytics: gains insight from historical data with reporting, scorecards,
clustering etc.
● Predictive Analytics: employs predictive modelling using statistical and machine
learning techniques
● Prescriptive Analytics: recommends decisions using optimisation, simulation, etc.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS CAPABILITIES

Business intelligence and analytics promise to deliver correct, nearly real-time information to
decision makers, and the analytic tools help them quickly understand the information and take
action. There are six analytic functionalities that BI systems deliver to achieve these ends:
• Production reports: These are predefined reports based on industry specific requirements.
• Parameterized reports: Users enter several parameters as in a pivot table to filter data and
isolate impacts of parameters. For instance, you might want to enter region and time of day to
understand how sales of a product vary by region and time. If you were Starbucks, you might
find that customers in the East buy most of their coffee in the morning, whereas in the
Northwest customers buy coffee throughout the day. This finding might lead to different
marketing and ad campaigns in each region.
• Dashboards/scorecards: These are visual tools for presenting performance data defined by
users.
• Ad hoc query/search/report creation: These allow users to create their own reports based
on queries and searches
• Drill down: This is the ability to move from a high-level summary to a more detailed view.
• Forecasts, scenarios, models: These include the ability to perform linear forecasting, what-
if scenario analysis, and analyze data using standard statistical tools.

Choosing between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics

While superficially similar, the difference between business intelligence vs business
analytics is clear: BI uses past and current data to optimize the present for current success. BA
uses the past and analyzes the present to prepare companies for the future.
Choosing the solution for your business depends on your aims. If you are satisfied with
your business model as a whole and mainly wish to improve operations, increase efficiency
and meet organizational goals, business intelligence may be an optimal solution. In particular,
companies that rely on real-time reporting tend to lean toward BI. On the other hand, if you
intend to change your business processes, or even your entire business model but don’t yet
have the necessary insights, business analytics might be the best option.
It may feel overwhelming to select the correct system. However, there are simple ways
to determine the best option, and mostly they come down to what you prioritize in your
decision-making process: current improvements or future planning.
Companies that require extensive data (e.g. the need for data warehousing) and intuitive
reporting should seriously consider business intelligence. BI has the added advantages of
targeting a business’s weak areas and providing actionable insights to those problems. Business
Intelligence tools are excellent solutions for managers who want to improve decision making
and understand their organization’s productivity, work processes and employees. And, with
that understanding, improve their business from the ground up.
Q1. What are the challenges of data management?
Ans: The different challenges which we face during data management are as follows:
Data Redundancy. Independent data files included a lot of duplicated data; the same data
(such as a customer’s name and address) were recorded and stored in several files. This data
redundancy caused problems when data had to be updated. Separate file maintenance programs
had to be developed and coordinated to ensure that each file was properly updated. Of course,
this coordination proved difficult in practice, so a lot of inconsistency occurred among data
stored in separate files.
Lack of Data Integration. Having data in independent files made it difficult to provide end
users with information for ad hoc requests that required accessing data stored in several
different files. Special computer programs had to be written to retrieve data from each
independent file. This retrieval was so difficult, time-consuming, and costly for some
organizations that it was impossible to provide end users or management with such
information. End users had to extract the required information manually from the various
reports produced by each separate application and then prepare customized reports for
management.
Data Dependence. In file processing systems, major components of a system—the
organization of files, their physical locations on storage hardware, and the application software
used to access those files—depended on one another in significant ways. For example,
application programs typically contained references to the specific format of the data stored in
the files they used. Thus, changes in the format and structure of data and records in a file
required that changes be made to all of the programs that used that file. This program
maintenance effort was a major burden of file processing systems. It proved difficult to do
properly, and it resulted in a lot of inconsistency in the data files.
Lack of Data Integrity or Standardization. In file processing systems, it was easy for data
elements such as stock numbers and customer addresses to be defined differently by different
end users and applications. This divergence caused serious inconsistency problems in the
development of programs to access such data. In addition, the integrity (i.e., the accuracy and
completeness) of the data was suspect because there was no control over their use and
maintenance by authorized end users.

Data Access
Data access refers to a user's ability to access or retrieve data stored within a database or other
repository. Users who have data access can store, retrieve, move or manipulate stored data,
which can be stored on a wide range of hard drives and external devices.

Data Administration
Data administration is the process by which data is monitored, maintained and managed by a
data administrator and/or an organization. Data administration allows an organization to
control its data assets, as well as their processing and interactions with different applications
and business processes. Data administration ensures that the entire life cycle of data use and
processing is on par with the enterprise’s objective.

Managing concurrency
In information technology and computer science, especially in the fields of computer
programming, operating systems, multiprocessors, and databases, concurrency control ensures
that correct results for concurrent operations are generated, while getting those results as
quickly as possible.
Computer systems, both software and hardware, consist of modules, or components. Each
component is designed to operate correctly, i.e., to obey or to meet certain consistency rules.
When components that operate concurrently interact by messaging or by sharing accessed data
(in memory or storage), a certain component's consistency may be violated by another
component. The general area of concurrency control provides rules, methods, design
methodologies, and theories to maintain the consistency of components operating concurrently
while interacting, and thus the consistency and correctness of the whole system. Introducing
concurrency control into a system means applying operation constraints which typically result
in some performance reduction. Operation consistency and correctness should be achieved with
as good as possible efficiency, without reducing performance below reasonable levels.
Concurrency control can require significant additional complexity and overhead in a concurrent
algorithm compared to the simpler sequential algorithm.

Crash Recovery
DBMS is a highly complex system with hundreds of transactions being executed every second.
The durability and robustness of a DBMS depends on its complex architecture and its
underlying hardware and system software. If it fails or crashes amid transactions, it is expected
that the system would follow some sort of algorithm or techniques to recover lost data.

Q6. Explain challenges while selecting vendor, vendor management.

Ans: The following steps should be followed during Selecting a vendor.
1. Develop a vendor management strategy.
Begin with a plan that pairs well with your organization’s needs to save you time, energy, and
frustration in the long-run. Determine your end goal and work backwards to identify budget,
user requirements, and other considerations before the outset.
2. Identify your selection criteria.
As with any large purchase, identify what must-haves you’re unwilling to compromise on, a
timeline for making your selections, and how you and your vendors will work together long-
term. Not only does identifying your criteria up front reduce bias, but it also ensures you seek
out vendors that pair well with your company’s values and organizational strategy (i.e., speed,
security) before you’re forced into a quick decision.
3. Write a bid document.
Formalize and document the process with a written RFQ, RFI, or RFP to properly summarize
your company’s needs, ask the right questions of potential vendor candidates, and get the most
accurate information back to help you make your decision.

4. Evaluate and select suppliers.

Look back at your original vendor management strategy to help you make the best, most
unbiased decision that accounts for all your selection criteria instead of just one (i.e., cost).
Don’t forget to consider potential legal issues in new countries to ensure compliance before
you make your decision.
5. Negotiate the contract.
After you’ve selected a vendor that meets your needs, to pursue, work with them to negotiate
the terms of your agreement. While a potentially lengthy process, getting the contract right
early on will ensure long-term success throughout your vendor partnership.
6. Manage the relationship.
Despite the already lengthy process, continuing to engage with your vendors is crucial to
getting the most out of your relationship. It’s important to treat your vendors more like partners
than third parties, communicating regularly, involving them in strategy, and reciprocating the
attention to better understand their business as well. Doing so will ensure long-term benefits
like trust and familiarity instead of regularly switching vendors for short-term gains that will
end up costing you more money in the long run.

The Challenges of IT Vendor Management

Despite high potential gains, the failure rate of outsourcing remains high. This is mainly due to
the ever-evolving nature of IT needs and requirements throughout the business, as well as lack
of complete buy-in on the part of either the client or the vendor. Yet, sourcing and vendor
management (SVM) leaders still face more challenges in managing vendor relationships across
the enterprise:
• Evolving business and IT requirements. As IT becomes more focused on aligning
with strategic initiatives across the business, so too are the company’s technology needs
rapidly changing. At the same time, IT must balance evolving business requirements
with meeting the latest security standards. With so much red tape to cut through,
focusing on innovation and collaborating with vendors becomes less of a priority.
• Contract processes. Even SVMs with extensive IT contract knowledge (which is rare)
can face procurement challenges when the process is managed by a completely different
 team (usually in the finance department). This division may lead to discrepancies and
inefficiencies in the drawing up of contracts, causing the SVMs heartburn down the
road. When combined with pre-existing contracts that don’t meet the fast-paced nature
of IT, companies may end up stuck in long-term agreements that force them to use
outdated technologies.
• Implementation. According to Gartner, “through 2019, every dollar invested in
innovation across the business will require an additional $7 in IT execution, which
SVM leaders will have to manage.”* Implementation becomes especially difficult
when you must manage contract terms and expiration dates along with the ever-
evolving needs of the business in a fast-paced IT environment.