Introduction Cisco Systems, Inc. is a big player in the Internet technologies field, manufacturing their primary product – the router. Two Stanford computer scientists founded the company in 1984, unbelievably by 1997, Cisco became a fortune 500 company and in the following year Cisco’s market capitalization was over $100 billion dollars. With the gigantic growth experienced Cisco needed to look into their future regarding their existing Enterprise Resource Planning package. Unreliability and common outages brought into question the validity of trying to enlarge the current system to meet the Cisco’s constantly growing needs. The current system was a UNIX-based software package that supported financial, manufacturing, and order-entry systems. An upgrade was made available to Cisco, but would be a fix that offered more reliability and redundancy without maintainability or room for growth. The management structure in 1993 provided that each functional business unit make its own decisions regarding the future of their IT Continue reading
Modern Information Systems
Data Mining – Meaning, Processes and Models
Data mining involves the use of sophisticated data analysis tools to discover previously unknown, valid patterns and relationships in large data sets. These tools can include statistical models, mathematical algorithms, and machine learning methods such as neural networks or decision trees. Consequently, data mining consists of more than collecting and managing data, it also includes analysis and prediction. The objective of data mining is to identify valid, novel, potentially useful, and understandable correlations and patterns in existing data. Finding useful patterns in data is known by different names (e.g., knowledge extraction, information discovery, information harvesting, data archaeology, and data pattern processing). The term “data mining” is primarily used by statisticians, database researchers, and the business communities. The term KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) refers to the overall process of discovering useful knowledge from data, where data mining is a particular step in this process. The steps in the KDD process, Continue reading
Advertising in the Ubiquitous Age
Ubiquitous computing, which is also referred to as pervasive computing, is about the notion that as a result of continuous advances in engineering, information technology, communications, integrated circuit chip technologies and sensors etc. computer technology devices will become smaller, cheaper, more capable and better able to weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they become indistinguishable from it. It was Mark Weiser, chief scientist of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre, who first presented the concept of ubiquitous computing, the third wave in computing and predicted that technology will recede into the background of our lives as computers evolve into quite, invisible servants that will help people to calmly do all kinds of tasks in a manner that will prevent them from becoming overloaded by interactions with computing. Thus, computers will extend the human unconscious and enhance their ability to productively control, interact and sense their environment. Unlike the Continue reading
Cybersecurity – Best Practices to Protect Business Organizations
In any organization, there are set duties, assignments and responsibilities to accomplish department goals, targeted objectives, and outcomes. Employees at every level within a business organization should take their responsibilities about Cybersecurity very seriously and be part of the organization Cybersecurity focus. Every department under the business structure should know what their part within the organization cybersecurity program. Every one, though matter what department they belong to should work as a team to meet and exceed the organization cybersecurity goals. Having a great cybersecurity program is the responsibility of management and it should be a part of every facet in all sectors of the business. In every organization with an IT department, the IT department is the regulator of the business cybersecurity program. They create the policy, in accordance with the business goals, mission, and objectives. They build, implement and monitor the organization cybersecurity program against the business set goals. Continue reading
Artificial Intelligence vs Human Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is the art of programming computers in order to produce intelligent behavior, whereas brain theory is the study of the brains function, to understand how the brain functions, the stimulations that go within and how outputs are produced via mathematical modeling and computer stimulation. It can be argued that both contain similar characteristics for functionality, both works together, this can be seen through artificial intelligence used to understand the roles of brain mechanisms. Furthermore both are involved in high cognitive task, such as reasoning, problem solving and decision making. Although some philosophers have accepted that machines can do everything that humans can do, some disagree with this view arguing that such high sophisticated behavior such as love, emotions discovery and moral decisions can only be carried out by humans. AI for many years has been pursuing the study of intelligent behaviour, but using artificial methodology. Intelligence can be Continue reading
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) – Explanation, Role, and Functions
Before the emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA), the term middleware would often be equated with an application server. However, today with the degree of progress on service-oriented architecture the term middleware will often be equated with Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This is because if the application server is the foundation for middleware then ESB represents the largest and most important part of middleware in Service Oriented Architecture. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a term used to describe a wide variety of products whose primary goal is to extend the simple messaging capabilities of an application server to allow the inclusion of enterprise functionality needed to support SOA. It has also been observed that a major difference between ESB and middleware is the fact that ESB is Service-Oriented whereas middleware has functions that are applicable outside the realm of services in a distributed system. The ESB can accomplish business communication by Continue reading