Week 2 Discussion Comments

You made some very good points this week. I also appreciate the examples you included from work environments.

W2D1 Does IT Matter article

You commented in the future that we will not be travelling to meetings. This is already happening in significant ways. Major consulting companies like Accenture and IBM have invested in facilities to make it very easy to hold meetings with people from multiple continents connected electronically. Technology from Cisco and others makes it possible for small businesses to conduct remote meetings. I have delivered lectures to groups in Arkansas from an office in Glencoe, Illinois. Dominican has technology that would allow a lecture or guest lecture to be delivered to everyone in an online class with students logging in from any location.

Personal opinion: The issues with indiscriminate email storage is not the cost of disk space. It's the cost of polluting future searches for information with useless stuff and the legal liability of having something that you were not required to retain discovered by opposing counsel in a lawsuit.

Another personal opinion: You can manage Information Technology the way my wife manages household spending: Spend less on the routine and more on the strategic. She will walk a half a mile to avoid a parking fee but is willing to spend on things that matter to her lifestyle such as owning a kayak. My analogy is that a trucking company should minimize expenses on payroll and email but spend strategically on a system that uses GPS to keep track of truck locations, automatically determine the order of truck loading, and calculates the best route for each trip. Hospitals should invest in EMR and control expenses on more routine technology.

I agree that deciding when you upgrade software such as Microsoft Office varies by business. I could make a case for Dominican to upgrade because my BAD220 undergraduates want to be taught on the latest release so their skills are more "advanced" when they enter the work place. A small manufacturing company could do very well with an older release.

From being the the software business, I would like to challenge the notion that if you wait to upgrade you will avoid bugs. Everything has bugs. Sometimes there are advantages to keeping older software because you know where the bugs and limitations are. The new release may fix the old bugs but it will introduce new ones.

 

W2D2

You mentioned iTunes, Neflix and Groupon. None of these businesses are IT only. Both Netflix and iTunes gained advantages by negotiations for content. Groupon has "feet on the street" calling on merchants to arrange deals and training merchants on how to deal with Groupon customers. I know I was surprised when I first started using Groupon that merchants had heard of it and offered "no problems" in accepting Groupons. My experiences with a Groupon competitor "Buywithme" have been acceptable but not as good.

As one of you noticed, Apple is about to begin a service that will allow you to purchase music and not download it. Their cloud offering will cost $24.95 per year and they appear to be hosting it on commercial cloud providers (Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2).

Verizon LTE allows you to download about 5 movies with 90 minutes over your 4G cell phone. Unfortunately, this will exhaust your entire 5GB monthly limit and future downloads will cost $10 per GB.

 

 

W2D3

 

It is possible to setup SAP training at a University without a lot of IT Investment. SAP has options where the software can be setup at another University or on an SAP Server. The main investment would be in faculty training and making a commitment to SAP as to how many students would take the course.

The cost/byte stored is much lower on data center hard disks than it is on a flash drive. Student data storage is not currently taxing Dominican's resources. Dominican always has the option to outsource storage or software if this were to become cost effective. For example, anyone can license the use of Blackboard on a server provided by Blackboard. The charge is on a per course basis and the last time I looked, this would cost more than running it internally.