How Does Blockchain Technology Work?

The ability to own and to transfer assets via transactions is at the heart of economic value creation. And to keep track of these business agreements, market participants have always relied on ledgers. But to make sure that these ledgers remain accurate and are not being tampered with by fraudulent market participants, most business networks rely on central, trusted parties, such as banks or other intermediaries, to oversee these business ledgers and to validate each transaction that is taking place within the network. This need for an intermediary has become even more important in the modern age, as assets have increasingly been digitalised and central third parties are required to make sure that a digital asset is not duplicated and spent more than once by the same party. But while the use of such a central intermediary brings the major benefit of introducing trust into the system, it also comes Continue reading

What is Electronic Records Management (ERM)?

ISO standard 15489: 2001 defines Records Management (RM) as the field of management responsible for the efficient and systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use, and disposition of records, including the processes for capturing and maintaining evidence of and information about business activities and transactions in the form of records. Electronic Records Management (ERM) guarantees that your company has the records they need when they are needed. Records management is referred to a set of activities that are required for systematically controlling the distribution, use, creation, maintenance, and disposition of all recorded information that’s maintained as proof of business transactions and activities. Records management is mainly concerned with the evidence of a company’s activities. Applying records management usually occurs according to the value of the records, not their physical formats. The essential records managements are capable of assigning specific identifiers to individual records, providing safeguards against all unauthorized changes Continue reading

Case Study of Nike: The Cost of a Failed ERP Implementation

Nike, was founded in the year 1957 by Knight and the company since the very beginning manufacturing higher quality sports shoes for several sports inclusive of athletics, football, volleyball etc. Additionally, the company also has been involved in manufacturing equipment’s for fitness and related sports apparels such as caps. The organization since its development has always been involved in making higher commitments to innovative products. In the fiscal year of 2012, 24.1 billion dollars was generated by Nike with an increase by 16 percent since the last year. The organization further made announcements of increasing this total revenue generated in the 2015 fiscal year to reach 30 billion. More than 50000 employees across the globe are employed by Nike and there are several contracts wherein the company employs more than 80000 individuals. The mission statement of Nike is to develop inspiration and to consistently innovate for each sports person across Continue reading

The Five Stages of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence  is the process of transforming related business data into information, information into knowledge and with repetitive identification turning knowledge into Intelligence. Data: It is a raw data i.e. it represents reality, facts and figures. Information: It is a data that is processed and interpreted. Knowledge: After the information is processed, it becomes more sensible containing some meaning and understanding. Business Intelligence (BI) is a wide category of applications and technologies for collecting, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help the enterprise users make better decision making. BI applications supports the activities decision support systems, querying and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical data analysis, forecasting and data mining. Some important definitions of  Business Intelligence are: Business Intelligence is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and Continue reading

Data Mining and Privacy Concerns

In data mining, the privacy and legal issues that may result are the main keys to the growing conflicts. The ways in which data mining can be used is raising questions regarding privacy. Every year the government and corporate entities gather enormous amounts of information about customers, storing it in data warehouses. Part of the concern is that once data is collected and stored in a data warehouse, who will have access to this information? Oftentimes a consumer may not be aware that the information collected about him/her is not just shared with who collected the information. With the technologies that are available today, data mining can be used to extract data from the data warehouses, finding different information and relationships about customers and making connections based on this extraction, which might put customer’s information and privacy at risk. Data mining necessitates data arrangements that can cover consumer’s information, which Continue reading

Social Engineering Attacks – Explanation with Examples and Prevention Tips

The rise of 21st century marked the transition phase of the most global businesses towards a paperless office environment, where the focus shifted the manual to the computerized form of work culture. But at the same time, change brought a number of threats and menace in terms of one of the biggest issues of the current businesses, the social engineering used among the hackers for cracking techniques that rely more on human weaknesses rather than technology itself. The aim or motive of such attacks was getting access to passwords or other relevant information by tricking people for carrying out illegal or criminal activities. FBI and other security experts hold a firm view that majority of threats originate from the internal working environment or employees who have been granted additional privileges or authorities to company’s information. People who have an urge for power and control over other individuals exhibit the social Continue reading