Online shopping ?!!

Many think that E business is same as E commerce where the fact is that they are a bit different. 

E commerce is  the process of buying, selling, transferring or exchanging of products, services or information using internet (IT). 

WHERE

E Business is a broader definition of EC, including buying and selling of goods and services, and also servicing customers, collaborating with partners, conducting e-learning and conducting electronic transactions within an organization.

Not every organization that uses E commerce are purely online. Electronic Commerce depends on the degree of digitization involved :

Brick-and-mortar organizations are purely physical organizations.

Virtual organizations are companies that are engaged only in EC. (Also called pure play)

Click-and-mortar organizations are those that conduct some e-commerce activities, yet their business is primarily done in the physical world. i.e. partial EC.

Types of E commerce :

• Business to Business (B2B)

Website following B2B business model sells its product to an intermediate buyer who then sells the product to the final customer. As an example, a wholesaler places an order from a company's website and after receiving the consignment, sells the end product to final customer who comes to buy the product at wholesaler's retail outlet.

Business to Consumer(B2C)

Website following B2C business model sells its product directly to a customer. A customer can view products shown on the website of business organization. The customer can choose a product and order the same. Website will send a notification to the business organization via email and organization will dispatch the product/goods to the customer.

Consumer to Consumer (C2C)

Website following C2C business model helps consumer to sell their assets like residential property, cars, motorcycles etc. or rent a room by publishing their information on the website. Website may or may not charge the consumer for its services. Another consumer may opt to buy the product of the first customer by viewing the post/advertisement on the website.

Consumer to Business (C2B)

In this model, a consumer approaches website showing multiple business organizations for a particular service. Consumer places an estimate of amount he/she wants to spend for a particular service. For example, comparison of interest rates of personal loan/ car loan provided by various banks via website. Business organization who fulfills the consumer's requirement within specified budget approaches the customer and provides its services.

Business to Government (B2G)

B2G model is a variant of B2B model. Such websites are used by government to trade and exchange information with various business organizations. Such websites are accredited by the government and provide a medium to businesses to submit application forms to the government.

Government to Business (G2B)

Government uses B2G model website to approach business organizations. Such websites support auctions, tenders and application submission functionalities.

Government to Citizen (G2C)

Government uses G2C model website to approach citizen in general. Such websites support auctions of vehicles, machinery or any other material. Such website also provides services like registration for birth, marriage or death certificates. Main objectives of G2C website are to reduce average time for fulfilling people requests for various government services.

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• Mobile Commerce

E commerce depends on three main mechanisms :

• Auction where buyers and seller exchange goods and services
• Forward auction as a channel to many potential buyers. Highest bid wins
• Reverse auctions, one buyer, usually an organization, wants to buy a product or a service.  The buyer posts a request for quotation (RFQ) on its Web site Suppliers study the RFQ and submit bids, and the lowest bid wins the auction.

Electronic Payment Methods :

Electronic checks (e-checks)

Electronic credit cards

Purchasing cards

Electronic cash

Stored-value money cards     - Smart cards

                                     - Person-to-person payments

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF ECOMMERCE

Adv's

• Faster buying/selling procedure, as well as easy to find products.
• Buying/selling 24/7.
• More reach to customers, there is no theoretical geographic limitations.
• Low operational costs and better quality of services.
• No need of physical company set-ups.

Disadv

• There is no guarantee of product quality.
• Mechanical failures can cause unpredictable effects on the total processes.
• As there is minimum chance of direct customer to company interactions, customer loyalty is always on a check.
• There are many hackers who look for opportunities, and thus an ecommerce site, service, payment gateways, all are always prone to attack.

Legal Issues in E commerce 

Click on this link to know more  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDcl_1YWIX4

We are All connected

Computer Network

Networks , a common term we hear and see pretty everywhere , but what are computer networks ??

Computer Networks are defined a group of computers connected to each other electronically. This means that the computers can "talk" to each other and that every computer in the network can send information to the others. 

Types of computer Networks :

1. A local area network  (LAN) connects two or more computers, and may be called a corporate network in an office or business setting.
2. Personal Area Network (PAN)  short range networks which connect one or two computers with short distance.
3. Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) a network which covers a metropolian area.
4. Wide Area Network (WAN) connects two or more smaller networks together. The largest internetwork is called the Internet.
5. Enterprise Network a network that is found in companies which contains various LAN and WAN. Such network has a backbone which operates as server to the network.

How Networks Work ?

Networks transmit information with two basic types of signals :

• Analog Signals > waves that constantly transfer information by altering characters of the waves. its two main parameters are amplitude (the higher it is the louder is the sound)  and frequency (how closely are the waves packed) , Egs ; Human Voice.
• Digital Signals > binary signals that transmit information in 0's and 1's. These signals are interpreted by a computer

Network connections (media and channels)

Three types of Cabled connections :

• Twisted-pair wire: mostly used in electrical appliances. 
• Coaxial cable: Mostly used in TVs.
•  Fiber optics: Considered the fastest between the three types.

Broadcast connections comprise of  microwaves and electromagnetic based transmitting means such as : satellite , infrared , microwaves and wireless.

Transmission Technologies

Digital Subscriber Line: a high-speed, digital data transmission technology using existing analog telephone lines.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode: data transmission technology that uses packet switching and allows for almost unlimited bandwidth on demand.

Synchronous Optical Network: an interface standard for transporting digital signals over fiber optic lines that allows users to integrate transmissions from multiple vendors.

T-Carrier System: digital transmission system that defines circuits that operate at different rates, all of which are multiples of the basic 64 Kbps user to transport a single voice call.

Network Protocols

A protocol is the set of rules and procedures governing transmission across a network.

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)  is a file transfer protocol that can send large files of information across sometimes unreliable networks with assurance that the data will arrive uncorrupted.

usually data is transferred on the internet by this process (shown in picture) 

Internet 

its wide area network that connect many computers and devices globally. Individuals can acccess the internet through :

• Internet kiosks
• Dial-up
• DSL
• Cable Modem
• Satellite
• Wireless
• Fiber to the Home 

WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW) :

A system of universally accepted standards for storing, retrieving, formatting, and displaying information via a client/server architecture.

• Home page: a text and graphical screen display that usually welcomes the user and explains the organization that has established the page.
• Uniform resource locator: the set of letters that points to the address of a specific  resource on the Web.

Domain names consist of multiple parts, separated by dots, which are red from right to left.

Top-level domain: the rightmost part of an Internet name; common top-level domains are .com, .edu, .gov     www.business.auburn.edu

Name of the company: the next section of the Internet name  www.business.auburn.edu

Name of the specific computer: the next section of the Internet name www.business.auburn.edu

Data Management..

Organizations are piled up with data that come various places and that happens almost every day. IT quiet challenging for an organization to manage this vast flood of data and that because the amount of data is increasing rapidly , this data is collected by various employees and to secure,maintain quality of this data is not an easy job.





Inspite of these challenges, the process of managing information across an organization is still carried out "Data Governance" and that is done by using a Master Data management system which stores,process,analyzes master data accurately and timely with less duplication.

The Data Base approach or Database management system is a software like microsoft access which help to avoid Data redundancy , Data isolation and Data inconsistency also Data security , Data integrity and finally Data independence.

DataBase is an organized collection of data.

1- Data Hierarchy the picture here explains how data is organized in DBMS

Data Base Design every database shall contain the following :

A- data model wich is a diagram that represents the entities in the database and their relationships.

B- Entity is a person, place, thing, or event about which information is maintained.

c-Record generally describes an entity.

d-An attribute is a particular characteristic or quality of a particular entity.

E- The primary key is a field that uniquely identifies a record.

F- Secondary keys are other field that have some identifying information but typically do not identify the file with complete accuracy.

Database designers plan the database design in a process called entity-relationship (ER) modeling. ER diagrams consists of entities, attributes and relationships. Like what shows in the picture :

Data Warehouses and Data Marts

Features of a Data warehouses and Data Marts 
Organized by business dimension or subject 
 Multidimensional Historical 
 Use online analytical processing 

Data warehouse is a repository of historical data organized by subject to support decision makers in the organization.  Historical data in data warehouses can be used for identifying trends, forecasting, and making comparisons over time. 
Online analytical processing (OLAP) involves the analysis of accumulated data by end users.
 In contrast to OLAP, online transaction processing (OLTP) typically involves a database, where data from business transactions are processed online as soon as they occur.

Example of DATA WAREHOUSE >

Multidimensional models are used to store and analyze a database , this pictures shows an example of such models :

Knowledge Management

Knowledge (that is contextual, relevant, and actionable).management is a process that helps organizations manipulate important knowledge that is part of the organization’s memory, usually in an unstructured format.

Types of Knowledge

1- Explicit knowledge: objective, rational, technical knowledge that has been documented. Examples: policies, procedural guides, reports, products.

2-Tacit knowledge: cumulative store of subjective or experiential learning.  Examples: experiences, insights, expertise, know-how.

Knowledge management systems refer to the use of information technologies to systematize, enhance, and expedite intrafirm and interfirm knowledge management.

Knowledge Management System Cycle:

Information Security

Organization in todays world are usually saturated with data bases that contain information and various people (employees , customers other businesses etc) and they are very much exposed to the various threats available in the technology world.
 Every Business of such situation shall defend information from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, perusal, inspection, recording or destruction "Information Security".

What Makes an organisation vulnerable to these threats is ?
Organization are very connected through the internet nowadays thus if one got infected then other also get it too.

Hacking systems with very little knowledge in programing enabled individuals to practice such acts easily.

 Group of people who commit crime over the internet "organized crime" are widely common on the internet , "cyber crime" individuals who do crime over the internet are also been taken over by organized crime.

Organizations and individuals are now exposed to many untrusted networks.

Human Mistakes or whats called "Unintentional Threats "
Cost companies significant losses of information and money.

The most dangerous employees are those in human resources and MIS.  HR employees have access to sensitive personal data on all employees. MIS employees not only have access to sensitive personal data, but also control the means to create, store, transmit, and modify these data.
Any bad employee intentions or a simple mistake such as performing careless internet surfing while operating on a PC which contain this information will easily cause information losses.
 Tailgating is also a big threat to those staff who operate on valuable things such as safe boxes.
Social engineering a common threat to organization employees. The link here demonstrates it

Moving on to the other category of threats which are intentional attacks to companies.

The following are some types of these attacks : 

1- Espionage or trespass this is when an unauthorized individual attempts to gain illegal access to organizational information.
  2-Identity theft the intentional assumption of another persons identity , usually to gain access to his/her financial information or to frame a person to crime
3- Sabotage or vandalism it the act of defacing an organizations website possibly causing the organization to lose its image or confidence by its customers.
  4-Software attacks sending malicious software to an organization computer system. Eg: viruses , trojan horse etc.

Organisations protect them self from these threats

By implementing mitigation strategies or risk management.  Speaking of the the mitigation strategies the general guidelines for applying risk mitigation handling options are shown in the picture at the right .
These options are based on the assessed combination of the probability of occurrence and severity of the consequence for an identified risk. These guidelines are appropriate for many, but not all, projects and programs.

Informations Security Control types are 

Physical controls. Physical protection of computer facilities and resources.

Access controls. Restriction of unauthorized user access to computer resources; use biometrics and passwords controls for user identification.

Communications (network) controls.  To protect the movement of data across networks and include border security controls, authentication and authorization.


 In conclusion since the networks we are connected through are filled with such kinds of threats , businesses should take a lot of precautions and give attentions to protect them selfs from these risks.