Fashion giant, Zara, forms part of the retail group ‘Grupo Inditex’ which is one of the “largest, fastest growing and successful” clothing retailers across Europe. Grupo Inditex is formulated by an amalgamation of major high street names from across Europe, including Zara, Pull and Bear and Bershka, in total boasting 3825 stores across 68 countries. Zara’s success story begins by offering a product range capable of catering for men, women and children, providing affordable and stylish clothes whatever the season. Coupled with this, is their keen eye for discovering new fashion trends and translating these trends from the catwalk to the high street, both quickly and affordably. Zara boasts a marketing strategy of firstly product variety with a focal point of ensuring speed to market. At present, Zara launch 10,000 new articles per year across their portfolio of stores. Finally, store location, as any marketing is left to store location Continue reading
Modern Information Systems
Characteristics of a Distributed System
Distributed Systems is an upcoming area in computer science and has the ability to have a large impact on the many aspects in the medical, scientific, financial and commercial sector. The most commonly used definition for a distributed system is, a system comprised of geographically dispersed computing components interacting on a hardware or software level. The rise in interest for distributed computing can be attributed to two major factors. The first factor is the creation and advancements in local and wide area networks which allow for large amounts of data to be transmitted over great distances in a short period of time. The second factor is the new craze of the Internet of Things (IoT), where nearly every physical device manufacture having some sort of internet connectivity allowing for the possibility of tens of billions of devices that are able to interact. This large network of interconnected devices can be Continue reading
Information Visualization
Information visualization is the process of showing the data in a graphical display which we cannot explain using words and text. In other words information visualization is a set of technologies that use visual computing to amplify human cognition with abstract information. The greatest advantage of information visualization is its ability to show the amounts of information that are beyond the capacity of textual display. Information visualization can significantly improve productivity. Users can explore large amounts of data, rapidly assimilate information from many sources, reason with it, understand it and create new knowledge based on it. With the right visual picture, people can make better decisions, faster, backed with more information. One of the most obvious benefits of information visualization is helping people see trends and anomalies in data, which can be particularly valuable in real-time environments. Visual techniques such as heat maps and tree maps, which help reveal patterns Continue reading
Fraud and Forensic Auditing
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
Business Value of Cloud Computing
In this article business value of cloud computing will be discussed. In deciding whether hosting a service in the cloud makes sense over the long term, it is argues that the fine-grained economic models enabled by Cloud Computing make trade-off decisions more fluid, and in particular the elasticity offered by clouds serves to transfer risk. As well, although hardware resource costs continue to decline, they do so at variable rates; for example, computing and storage costs are falling faster than WAN costs. Cloud computing can track these changes and potentially pass them through to the customer more effectively than building one’s own datacenter, resulting in a closer match of expenditure to actual resource usage. In making the decision about whether to move an existing service to the cloud, one must additionally examine the expected average and peak resource utilization, especially if the application may have highly variable spikes in resource Continue reading
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