Overview of Fraud – The Fraud Triangle Fraud has become an important topic in today’s business environment, especially in the light of scandals such as Enron (Read: Enron Accounting Scandal) and WorldCom (Read: WorldCom Accounting Scandal). While many think of top corporate executives committing fraudulent acts, especially those considering financial reporting, it is important to note that lower level employees also add to the risk of fraud within a company. The fraud triangle shows the three main elements necessary in order to create fraud: pressure, rationalization, and opportunity. Financial pressure is often the first reason someone within a corporation would want to commit fraud. This could take the form of a lower level employee who finds himself in a difficult personal situation and believes that he would only benefit from stealing from the company. Alternatively, an employee may commit fraud because they believe that the company or their job could Continue reading
Information Technology
E-Service Orientation
The traditional e-commerce paradigm based on e-tailing, commodity goods, and transaction sales, has largely failed and taking the international stock markets down with it (Dotcom bubble). Those organizations that have survived this meltdown have one thing in common – they learned quickly to embrace the e-service paradigm. The new e-service paradigm takes advantage of the inherent nature of the online environment to feature information flows and computation, as a means of learning more about customers and building long-term customer relationships. Its profitability model is based more on revenue expansion than on cost reduction, and those revenues come from enhancing the service experience rather than just replacing people with automated systems. E-service is a customer-centric concept, and thus, the strategic and tactical components of an e-service orientation focus on increasing value defined at the customer level. An e-service orientation is all about taking advantage of the electronic environment and the technology Continue reading
An Overview of Virtual Private Network (VPN) Technology
Virtual private networks (VPN) have gained popularity as a secure and cheaper medium for sensitive information to be accessed and transmitted between two or more corporate network over a public network such as the internet, other network technologies have been innovated and used to connect within business sites and across to other sites that are miles away from each other. In the sixties, sites were connected together to enable data transfer through the use of analog phone lines and 2,400-bps modems leased from AT&T, businesses had no other faster modems they could choose from because the telephone companies were controlled by the government. It was not until the early eighties that businesses were able to connect to sites at higher speed using 9,600-bps modems because other telephone companies emerged as a result of the changes in government control and policy on telephone. During this period, there were not much mobile Continue reading
Uses of Virtual Private Networks (VPN)
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a point to point connection that connects a user to a private network in a different location. Basically, VPNs are used to set up a secure connection to the internet. A VPN works by creating a point to point connection from a public wifi connection to a private wifi connection in a business or company building as if you are directly connected to the network. Since the normally accepted definition for a network is fairly common and usually accepted throughout the trade. A network consists of any variety of devices which may communicate through some arbitrary technique. Devices of this nature include computers, printers, and routers will reside in geographically numerous locations. The strategies during which they will communicate are varied, since there are infinite electronic communication specifications, data-link, transport, and application layer protocols. For the needs of simplicity, let’s simply agree that a Continue reading
Data Mining – Meaning, Steps and Business Applications
Data mining or knowledge discovery is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives & summarizing it into useful information. This information can be used to increase revenue & cut cost or both. We know that data mining software is one of a number of analytical tools for analyzing data. It allows users to analyze data from many angels & categories it. It also summarizes the relationship identified. Technically speaking data mining is the process of correlations among dozens of fields in large relational database. In other words it is the process of sorting through large amount of data & picking out important information. It is often use by business intelligence organizations & financial analysts. It is also used in the sciences to extract information from the data set generated by modern experiment & observational methods. Data mining in relation to Enterprise Resource Planning(ERP) is the statistical & logical Continue reading
What is Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM)?
Data-driven decision making (DDDM) refers to a process of making decisions that are based on data and statistical analysis. This approach is becoming increasingly popular in various industries and organizations, as it allows leaders and managers to make informed decisions based on facts, rather than intuition or personal opinions. DDDM involves collecting and analyzing large amounts of data and using the insights generated to make decisions that are informed by evidence. In other words, DDDM is a systematic and empirical approach to decision making that uses data and statistics to support or reject hypotheses, to draw inferences and to make predictions. The goal of DDDM is to identify patterns, correlations, and trends in data and use that information to make decisions that are likely to lead to better outcomes. The benefits of Data-driven decision making are many and varied. Firstly, it provides a framework for making decisions that are informed Continue reading