New technologies in IT Sector

Information technology has been evolving since globalization. Let's see in detail what all new technologies has been evolved in business information technology:

Introduction to hypermedia

Hypermedia is extension to hypertext that supports links among any set of multimedia objects including graphics, sound, and video elements in addition to text elements. Hypermedia is the ability to open new web pages by clicking images, movies, graphics and other media apart from text to create a non linear network of information.

For example, whenever you flown the mouse cursor over the image or video and the cursor changes, usually into a small hand, it means that the element is hypermedia. Clicking the text, image, or video will open up a new location in your web browser. Therefore, you should only click a hypertext or hypermedia link when you are ready to leave the current page. If you want to open the link in a new window, you can usually right click the link and select "Open Link In New Window".

The internet is the best illustration of hypermedia. Apart from internet, lot of software makes use of both hypermedia and hypertext. Microsoft office suite that includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software allow hypermedia to be embedded into the documents created. For example, In Microsoft word, users can add hyperlink to any word and even add links to pictures. Microsoft PowerPoint has the same features for hypermedia.

Multimedia can be delivered using:

Optical disk (CD-based): it is one of the most cost effective methods of delivery multimedia materials. These devices are used to store large amounts of some combination of text, graphics, sound, and moving video. This media compact disc (CD), Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) and Bluray Disc (BD). The main features of this approach are:

a) Can store high and multimedia elements

b) Can be permanently stored and not changeable

c) Information can be quickly outdated

Distributed network: This method is suitable for web based content that is website. Files are generally compressed before transfer.

The main features of this approach are:

a) Limited in pictures size and low video resolution 

b) Can be changes, damaged or deleted by irresponsible individuals.

c) Information can be updated easily and cheaper

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence(AI) is a branch of computer science constant making computers behave like human that is a development of such computers that can think and respond like human beings. This is one of the fastest growing branches of computer science. 

Application of artificial intelligence: Artificial intelligence has been used in a wide range of fields including Finance, hospitals and medicine, industry, music, games etc.

Finance: Bank use artificial intelligence systems to organise operations, invest in stocks, and managed properties. Banks use intelligence software applications to screen and analyse financial data.

Hospitals and medicine: A medical clinic and use artificial intelligence system to organise bed schedules, make a staff rotation, and provide medical information. 

Industry: robot have become common in many industries. They are often given jobs that are considered dangerous to humans. Robots have proven effective in jobs that are very repetitive which may lead to mistakes or accidents due to all that same concentration and other jobs which humans may find degrading. 

Aviation: Airlines use expert systems in place to monitor atmospheric conditions and system status. The plane can be put on autopilot once the course is set for the destination.

Weather forecast: Neural networks are used for predicting weather conditions. Previous data is fed to a neural networks which burns the pattern analysis that knowledge to predict weather patterns. 

Speech Recognition: In the 1990's, Computer speech recognition reached a practical level for limited purposes. Speech understanding systems are capable of recognising several several thousand words continuous speech.

Natural language processing: Natural language processing gives machines the ability to read and understand the languages that human speak. Many researchers hope that a sufficiently powerful natural language processing system would be able to acquire knowledge on its own, by reading the existing text available over the internet. Some straight forward applications of natural language processing include Information retrieval (or text mining) and machine translation.

Computer vision: in computer vision, the systems are capable of face recognition.

Robotics: creating robots that could perform physical tasks that were too dangerous for boring for human beings was considered to be an important commercial application of artificial intelligence.

Business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) refers to a computer-based technique that presents a collection of processes, tools and technologies helpful in achieving more profit by considerably improving the productivity, sales and service of an enterprise. With the help of business intelligence methods, the corporate data can be organised, analyse in a better way and then converted into a useful knowledge of information needed to initiate a profitable business action. Thus, business intelligence is about turning a raw, collected data into intelligent information by analysing and rearranging the data according to the relationships between the data items by knowing what data to collect and manage and in what context.

The main objective of business intelligence is to support better business decision making. Thus a business intelligence system can be called a decision support system (DSS).

Business intelligence tools are a type of application software design to retrieve, analyse and report data. The tools generally read data that have been previously stored in a data warehouse or data mart. Some commonly used business intelligence tools are- Spreadsheet, Data mining, Data warehousing, OLAP,etc.

Accompany collected raw data is an important asset where one can find solution to many of an organisation critical questions like what was the net profit for a particular product last year and what will be the says this year and what are the key factors to be focused on this year in order to increase sales?

Knowledge discovery in database

Knowledge discovery is a process that extracts implicit, potentially useful or previously unknown information from the data available in the database. 

Let's examine the knowledge discovery process in detail

a) Data comes from where it of sources is integrated into a single data store for target data.

b) Data then is preprocessed and transformed into standard format.

c) The data mining algorithms processing data to the output in form of patterns for rules.

d) Then those patterns and rules are interpreted to new or useful knowledge or information. 

The ultimate goal of knowledge discovery process is to find the patterns that hidden among the huge sets of data and interpret them to useful knowledge and information.

Data warehouses and data marts 

Many organisations now use data warehouses to bring multiple databases together and make them available for analytical purposes.

Data warehouse is a collection of data, usually current and historical, derived directly from multiple databases that life organisation can use for analysis and decision making. The purpose, of course, is to bring key sets of data about or used by the organisation into one place. Its specific purpose is to support business decisions, not business operations. So, it is a decision support database that is main teen separately from the organisations operational database. The process of constructing and using data warehouses is called Data warehousing. 

Bringing together so much data into a data warehouse makes analysis very difficult. To address this problem, organisations use what are called data marts.

Data marts of related set of data that are grouped together and separated out from the main body of data in the data warehouse. Data Marts are design to be made available to specific sets of users. For example, data about manufacturing can be put into a data mart and be made available to the production department. Human resource data can be put into another data mart and be provided to the human resources employees. 

So, a data mart is a simple form of a data warehouse that is focused on a single subject, such as sales, finance or marketing. Data Marts are often built and controlled by single department within an organisation. Given their single subject focus, data mass usually draw data from only a few sources. Resources could be internal operational systems, a central data warehouse, or external data.

Data mining

Data mining is defined as extracting information from the shoot set of data and using it to make crucial business decisions. In other words we can say that data mining is mining the knowledge from the data that improve business efficiency.

Data mining brings a lot of benefits to business society, governments as well as individual. However privacy, security and misuse of information are the big problems if they are not addressed and resolved properly.

Online analytical processing

Let's quickly review the business model of a large retail operation. If you just look at days sales, you soon realise that the sales are interrelated with many business dimensions. The daily sales are meaningful only when they are related to the date of the sales, the products, the distribution channels, the stores, the the sales territories and a few more dimensions. Multidimensional views are inherently representative of any business model. For planning in making strategic decisions, managers and executive look into business data through scenarios. For example, compare actual sales against targets and against sales in prior periods. They examined the breakdown of sales by product, by store, by sales territory, by promotion and so on.

Online analytical processing systems are capable of analysing online a large number of past transactions for large number of data records and summarised them. This type of data is usually multidimensional in nature. So, OLAP can be defined as an online approach used to quickly provide answers to analytical queries that are multidimensional in nature.

Enterprise resource planning

ERP is an acronym for enterprise resource planning. Enterprise resource planning is business process management software that integrates with various functions that are essential to running a business, including inventory and order management, accounting, human resources, customer relationship management into one complete system to streamline processes and information across the entire organisation. An effective enterprise resource planning system integrates both internal and external information flows used by the organisation within a single, comprehensive solution. The enterprise resource planning software air generally runs on a variety of computer hardware and network configuration, including "on premises" or hosted.

Supply chain management 

A supply chain is a network of facilities that performs the function of procurement of materials, transformation of these materials into intermediate and finished products, and the distribution of these finished products to customers. Traditionally, marketing, distribution, planning, manufacturing, and the purchasing organisations along the supply chain operated independently. These organisations understood the importance of humility effort to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Hence, these organisations are referred to collectively as the supply chain. The organisation that make up the supply chain are linked together through physical flows and information flows. Physical flows involve the transformation, movement, and storage of goods and materials. Information flows allow the various supply chain partners to co-ordinate their long-term plans, and to control the day-to-day flow of goods and material up and down the supply chain.

Supply chain management, then, is the active management of supply chain activities to maximize customer value. supply chain activities covers everything from product development, sourcing, production, and logistics, as well as the information systems needed to co-ordinate these activities.

Customer relationship management 

Customer relationship management is a business strategy that builds long term, profitable companies relation with specific customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves technology to organise, manage, automate and synchronise customer interactions and data throughout the customer life cycle. Customer relationship management is a customer oriented feature that provides service response on customer request based on customers input, one-to-one solutions to customers requirements, direct online communication with customer and customer service centre that are intended to help customers solve their issues. The company may communicate with customers through various modes including the company's website, telephone, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials and social media.

Customer relationship management software stores customer related information into a single customer relationship management database. The Other main functions of this software include recording various interactions, automating various workflow processes such as tasks, calendars and alerts, and giving manages the ability to track performance and productivity based on information logged within the system.

Geographic information system 

Geographic information system is a Computer based tool that allows you to create manipulate analyse store and display geographically reference information based on its location. A geographic information system technology allows you to compare the locations of different things in order to discover how they relate to each other.

Geographical information system integrate data hardware and software and different kinds of geographic information, such as digital maps aerial photographs, satellite images and global positioning system data.

Geographic information systems benefits organisations of all sizes and in almost every industry. There is a growing interest in an awareness of the economic and strategic value of geographic information systems. Common examples include real estate site selection, route or corridor selection, evacuation planning, conservation, natural resource extraction, etc. Making correct decisions about location is critical to the success of an organisation.

Geographic data stored in a vector graphics or raster graphics format. A vector format allows two dimensional data storage in terms of X and Y coordinates. A road or a river can be described as a series of x,y co-ordinate points. Nonlinear features such as town mountains can be stored as a closed loop of coordinates. The vector model is good for describing well delineated features. Arrested data format expresses data as a continuously changing set of grid cells.