Business Systems and Process, Operations Management by Carrefour - Essay Example

?Business Systems and Process/Operations Management INDIVIDUAL REPORT 2 – INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT Carrefour Case Study Table of Contents INTRODUCTION In the past, the purpose of implementing information technology in the businesses was to offer reports and some small business analysis charts to a small number of managerial staff. But with the passage of time, administrative structures have turned out to be less hierarchical and more decentralized. Thus, there is need to offer data and information to remotely located departments of business. Additionally, due to these changes in business structures, the information delivery process is also changed. In this scenario, IT managers face a lot of challenges in an attempt to bring real business intelligence within time and budget constraints. In the past, when the huge mainframe system empire clasped into a desktop era, IT businesses evolved as well. Additionally, the system storage capacity, processing power, specialized tools and decision-making information were distributed to clients who required freedom of corporate decision making. However, after few years, the pendulum started to shift and with the development of intranets and the Internet connected PC clients formed a networked society that valued information sharing. In this scenario, the IT businesses at the present must develop again. Nowadays they are forced to offer the central data repository and control that illustrate the mainframe era, in addition the rapid decision making and self-directed analysis that grows in the PC era (SAS, 2005), (Jiang et al., 2010) and (Lee & Noah, 1999). Carrefour, which is a France based corporation, has decided to implement a new technology based solution for overall corporate marketing analysis and decision making. This report will present a detailed analysis of implementation of enterprise intelligence platform at Carrefour. OVERVIEW of Business Carrefour, which is a France based corporation, has decided to implement a new technology based solution for overall corporate marketing analysis and decision making. This report presents a detailed analysis of important aspects of the new enterprise intelligence platform establishment and investigates possible security and confidentiality related issues in customer data in business data warehouse. INTRODUCING NEW ENTERPRISE INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM The basic purpose of implementing enterprise intelligence platform at Carrefour business is to enhance the business productivity and performance through better operational technology solutions. Seeing that, an enterprise intelligence platform is a collection of manual or computer-supported methods and tools that help manage a number of decision-making activities. In addition, in present day business structure, enterprise intelligence platforms are frequently recognized to be computerized administration information structures to facilitate business owners, decision-makers and executives to determine complicated business issues and challenges. In this scenario, a high-quality enterprise intelligence platform can be helpful for the business staff to carry out a broad range of jobs such as concept ranking, cash flow analysis, product performance development, multistage fore-casting and resource sharing investigation. Furthermore, in the past it was considered as a method or tool for huge corporations, but enterprise intelligence platform has now become equally important tool for small to large size businesses (ReferenceForBusiness, 2011), (Tang, 2006) and (Essaidi, 2010). Enterprise intelligence platform is a wide-ranging group of high-tech and advanced interactive computer systems and tools, mainly customizable systems, intended to support business data analysis and managerial decision making. In addition, enterprise intelligence framework is a member of a very large group which is known as management support systems. Furthermore, the main objective of implementing enterprise intelligence platform applications is to build an administrative structure in a more well-organized and efficient manner, mainly through discretionary and ad-hoc decisions (against custom or programmatic ones that need less findings). The implementation of these platforms can affect the business operations of a corporation. For example, by using enterprise intelligence platform an organization can be able to know whether customers are sending positive or negative comments about a new product or service it has just offered (ReferenceForBusiness, 2011), (Castellanos et al., 2010) and (Hrin et al., 2008). Issues Analysis In implementation of enterprise intelligence platform at Carrefour Business we can face different kinds of issue which can be classified into different groups as discussed below: (Laudon & Laudon, 1999) and (Turban et al., 2005) Technological issues In scenario of Carrefour Business the main technological issue could be regarding the selection of technology tool for the development of enterprise intelligence platform. Due to this reason there can emerge a lot of issues for instance what if technology that we have chosen for implementing enterprise intelligence system does not support the old business data because we have to move old collected business data into the new business enterprise intelligence platform. Thus, in this scenario we can face various data transformation issues those can cause some business losses. Furthermore, these issues can be hardware related. For instance, in case we have selected a less effective hardware technology to implement enterprise intelligence we can face some business data handling problems and issues those can stop or damage the overall business management process. Organizational issues The implementation of enterprise intelligence platform at Carrefour Enterprise can face different organizational issues. These organizational issues could be related to the management aspects. For instance, in case the management pays less attention toward this implementation then this project could fail. Thus, the employees need to offer their proper contribution for the enhanced business project analysis and management. Moreover, insufficient funds and less effective business process could lead to overall project failure. Furthermore, these organizational issues could lead toward the less effective cost and time planning for the project. HR related issues In case of Carrefour Business we can face some sort of human issues. One of main issues we can face is about the lack of availability of proper human resource that can effectively manage the development of enterprise intelligence platform. In view of the fact that after spending so much investment we cannot simply give such a sophisticated system into the hands of unqualified people. Therefore, there is need for more technical and skilled human resource for the better management of this development. Moreover, these human resource issues can also include some political factors. For instance, Carrefour business staff feels that enterprise intelligence platform will eliminate their need for business and automatic systems will take the charge of business. In such way they can raise a political campaign against the implementation of enterprise intelligence platform. ENSURING THE SECURITY AND CONFIDENTIALITY OF CUSTOMER DATA IN DATA WAREHOUSE Millions of people use internet to perform their every day jobs. Additionally, it is one of the effortless methods for organizations to gather customer personal data regarding their interest. In addition, through Internet, businesses carry on to gather this customer data using normal techniques such as software mailings or applications. If we talk about Carrefour Corporation here customers speak and administration listens then how business can save this data and information. In this scenario, different countries have formulated different security and privacy laws in order to defend private data and information from leakage, shifting, sale, or additional ways of data distribution not approved by the client to third parties. In this regard, third parties can include persons, organizations or further entities (Pacocha, 2002) and (Curphey & Araujo, 2006). To fulfill these criteria, organizations need to formulate information security strategies (ISS). In addition, customers have to be capable to recognize an organization’s place in scenario of defending their data and information. Consequently, privacy policy is considered as a tool to express organizational policies to the customers (Pacocha, 2002) and (Curphey & Araujo, 2006). The data warehouse is large size data storage accessed from numerous sources (legacy and operational) databases. Additionally, the data-warehouse is built but combining diverse data sources or changing them into a new structure. However, this process involves a lot of activities such as cleaning, reading, storing and aggregating the data in the warehouse representation. In this scenario, different software systems and tools are used to access the data warehouse for decision-making, strategic analysis, marketing kinds of applications. Moreover, it could be used for inventory control of shelf stock in various departmental stores (Bhargava, 2010). SECURITY AND CONFIDENTIALITY MEASURES FOR CUSTOMER DATA This section presents recommendations for implementing security strategy for customer data at the Carrefour Business Data warehouse platform: In order to manage security and confidentiality customer data for Carrefour Business data warehouse trying the use of higher security actions in an analytical data warehouse is normally valueless. Despite the fact that, uniform reporting is a different matter and uniform reporting, is not an alternative of security arrangement. The basic reason of this is it is the main area of date warehouse where it keeps most of the actions, as well as it is the most vulnerable to performance problems. In addition, a data warehouse that sets up a stress on consolidation looks for to arrange the data and information that it keeps. On the other hand, in place of this, organizations can decide to combine the data into a particular source. However, when numerous sources of business data and information will be combined, security will become be a serious issue (exforsys, 2007), (Weippl, 2006), (Warigon, 1997) and (Pacocha, 2002). In fact the data and information which are kept by the data warehouse require a different level of security as compared to data and information that are kept into an inventory system. In addition, various departments of a corporation can have their own rules for business data and information security. Moreover, for defining security criteria for a data warehouse, it is essential to make sure that every structure of information has its own security arrangement. Furthermore, if an organization wants to incorporate security to its data-warehouse, it will require making a decision where the information and data security system should be incorporated. However, the two places that are normally selected for this purpose are the database level and application level (exforsys, 2007), (Weippl, 2006), (Warigon, 1997) and (Pacocha, 2002). Implementing a security system within an application is valuable for the reason that it has to be linked to the data that is being processed by the application. In this scenario, following the process of security implementation, the next most excellent place to incorporate security is the Carrefour Business data warehouse itself. Because if security is incorporated to the data warehouse, all other associated programs will be protected. However, the selection of this security method will depend on a number of issues. On the other hand, if an organization is using more than one system inside the database, it can be most excellent to make use of a database level safety program. Furthermore, they can also make use of a database level security application for other purposes for instance, for accessing the business data warehouse (exforsys, 2007), (Weippl, 2006), (Warigon, 1997) and (Pacocha, 2002). At Carrefour Corporation, for managing security and privacy of data warehouse we need to establish a proper corporate security policy that would be able to effectively manage the business and operational areas. In addition, this security policy will serve as a guideline for the enhanced security management process. In this scenario we can implement the network firewall that can protect the business management areas from possible outsider attacks. Moreover, we can also implement the internal security login system that makes sure that only authorized people are able to get access to system and have proper security based entrance to the business systems. For the security of customer data inside the customer data warehouse at the Carrefour Business we will implement the complex data encryption that will protect the business and customer data from any possible hacking attacks or theft. Furthermore, we will also make sure that system is free of viruses. For this purpose we will install a proper anti-virus system that will be able to offer enhanced protection at all the levels of system working and operations. CONCLUSION An enterprise intelligence platform is a collection of manual or computer-supported methods and tools that help manage a number of decision-making activities. Carrefour, which is a France based corporation, has decided to implement a new technology based solution for overall corporate marketing analysis and decision making. This report has presented a detailed analysis of implementation of enterprise intelligence platform at Carrefour. This report has discussed various technical, organizational and human issues which can take place during this implementation. In the last, this report has discussed the ways to ensure the security and confidentiality of customer data in data warehouse. References Bhargava, B., 2010. Security in Data Warehouse (Invited talk). [Online] Available at: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/db/dblunch/doc/bb.doc [Accessed 15 March 2011]. Castellanos, M., Wang, S., Dayal, U. & Gupta, C., 2010. SIE-OBI: a streaming information extraction platform for operational business intelligence. In SIGMOD '10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Management of data., 2010. ACM New York, USA. Curphey, M. & Araujo, R., 2006. Web Application Security Assessment Tools. IEEE Security and Privacy, 4(4), pp.32-41. Essaidi, M., 2010. ODBIS: towards a platform for on-demand business intelligence services. In EDBT '10 Proceedings of the 2010 EDBT/ICDT Workshops., 2010. ACM New York, USA. exforsys, 2007. How To Protect Your Data Warehouse. [Online] Available at: http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/data-warehousing/how-to-protect-your-data-warehouse.html [Accessed 14 March 2011]. Hrin, G.R., Anghel, L.E. & David, A., 2008. Platform support for an intelligent enterprise business management. WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications, 5(5), pp.726-35. Jiang, C., Jensen, D.L., Cao, H. & Kumar, T., 2010. Building business intelligence applications having prescriptive and predictive capabilities. In WAIM'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Web-age information management. Heidelberg, 2010. Springer-Verlag Berlin. Laudon, K.C. & Laudon, J.P., 1999. Management Information Systems, Sixth Edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Lee, E. & Noah, W., 1999. An Enterprise Intelligence System Integrating WWW and Intranet Resources. In RIDE '99 Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Research Issues on Data Engineering: Information Technology for Virtual Enterprises., 1999. IEEE Computer Society Washington, DC, USA. Pacocha, A., 2002. Using Security To Protect The Privacy of Customer Information. [Online] Available at: http://www.sans.org/reading_room/whitepapers/privacy/security-protect-privacy-customer-information_690 [Accessed 15 March 2011]. ReferenceForBusiness, 2011. Decision Support Systems. [Online] Available at: http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Cos-Des/Decision-Support-Systems.html [Accessed 14 March 2011]. SAS, 2005. The SAS® Enterprise Intelligence Platform:SAS® Business Intelligence. [Online] Available at: http://www.sas.com/offices/europe/switzerland/pdf/solutions/EIP_Business_Intelligence.pdf [Accessed 15 March 2011]. Tang, P., 2006. Bip: Towards a Highly Configurable Business Intelligence Framework. In Proceeding of the 2006 conference on Advances in Intelligent IT: Active Media Technology 2006., 2006. IOS Press Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Turban, E., Leidner, D., McLean, E. & Wetherbe, J., 2005. Information Technology for Management: Transforming Organizations in the Digital Economy. New York: Wiley. Warigon, S., 1997. Data Warehouse Control and Security. Association of College and University Auditors LEDGER, 41(2), pp.3-7. Weippl, E.R., 2006. Security in Data Warehouses. [Online] Available at: http://www.sba-research.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/weippl_arh_securityDWH.pdf [Accessed 16 March 2011]. Read More