What Gives a Competitive Advantage in a Company - Assignment Example

QUESTION Chapter 5 - Which businesses are using supercomputing and grid computing? Describe these uses and the advantages they offer their adopting firms. Are they a source of competitive advantage? Why or why not? ANSWER Supercomputing and grip computing are being used by almost organizations across the board. Many organizations have moved from traditional computers to super computers for successfully accomplishing the effectiveness and efficiency in the business process (Armbrust et al., 2010). Organizations like airline, manufacturing, scientific research and defense; hence, majority of the firms have been using fast, parallel and software based super computers that mimic the parallel conduct of the problem. The core characteristics that make supercomputing and grid computer suitable for the organization is the fact problem to be computed using these computers can be divided into components (Foster et al., 2008). The components of the problem using these computing techniques are solved in parallel. For example, manufacturing of the car and generate effectiveness by employing the super computer where components of car are prepared in parallel. Once the components are prepared they can be combined into a unit in the form of a car (Rani & Suri, 2012). Similarly, business organizations that already had computers didn’t invest massively in buying a super computer and transformed their hardware into grid computers that mimic the massively parallel working of super computers. All organizations have been generating the competitive edge with supercomputing and grid computer e.g. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce was comparatively least impacted by subprime crises due to the use of these computers (Gallaugher, 2011). It is important to mention that problems that are linear in nature and cannot be solved into divided components combined in the final stage cannot take advantage of such computers as cannot be conducted in parallel. Car assembly requires setting of parts that can and cannot be fixed in parallel. Therefore, car assembly lines for most of the components (not all) employee human labor to conduct such operations (Gallaugher, 2011). QUESTION Chapter 5 - Many well-meaning individuals thought that recycling was the answer to the e-waste problem. But why hasn’t e-waste recycling yielded the results hoped for? ANSWER The electronic waste or commonly known as e-waste has been the long used answer to the rapidly mounting of technology related waste (Robinson, 2009). Meaningful individuals were of the view that as the new transformation and developments are in way, the industry of recycling will save the world from massive discards and metal based landfills. Contrary to the perception, the e-waste has not been successful in the producing the expected results. There are many reasons that hinder the performance of e-waste (Plambeck & Wang, 2009). Some major issues include complex value chains of the businesses, intricate international laws and most importantly the primary objective of the business to put as primary objective which in turn results in using the systems and components that contribute toxicity to the environment and lives of people. For example, the technological development has been consistently incorporating the feature of concise in product (Nnorom & Osibanjo, 2008). This results in the difficulty in separating the components. Also being labor intensive job, it is exported to countries having abundance of the labor. Labor in such countries work in the dreadful environment due to the non-facilitation of the equipment necessary for separate the elements such as plastics and copper etc. Also the water and air in such locations of e-waste recycling are highly contaminated. E.g. 70% of the children of these areas have high level of lead in their blood. Finally, organizations are investing multibillions for developing the sustainable business model and dealing with challenges of e-waste (Gallaugher, 2011). QUESTION Chapter 5 - Name two companies that have incurred the wrath of environmental advocates. What might these firms have done to avoid such criticism? ANSWERS 3 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico around 2.6 million gallons every day has affected the ocean in the wider range of ways than reported (Wallace, 2011). The spill incurred the wrath of environmental advocates in many ways. In addition to the affecting the life in the ocean, the spill also affected the environmental supported economics of the Southeast Asian and African-American families (Wallace, 2011). Similarly, Apple has been target of environmental activists for its negative impact on due to the excessive use of metals in its new products. This is despite fact that Apple took the pioneer position in cutting of lead lines from its glass-monitors (Kaiser, 2013). Also it is important to note that these big organizations are more prone to environmentalists’ pressure due to the sensitivity of reputation. Therefore, organizations in the contemporary world are on forefront in taking measures to transform the model towards environmental sustainability. Organizations are systematically setting goals, defining targets and devising measures for assessing targets of sustainability. Organizations in order to increasingly safeguard themselves from the failure on environmental front must also conduct audit the measures pertaining to the environment. Audit will then identify the details pertaining to the measures taken for the environmental sustainability as well as its consequences. For instance, such audit will assess the source to which the waste is being sold or passed on for further processing etc. This will retain the pressure on organizations to integrate the value chain members who fully or to maximum level gives consideration to the environmental conduct (Gallaugher, 2011). QUESTION Chapter 7 - What is crowd-sourcing? Give examples of organizations that are taking advantage of crowd-sourcing and be prepared to describe these efforts. ANSWERS 4 Simply stating crowd-sourcing refers to the shifting of the job responsibility from the traditional system in which the employees are hired for the specific purpose to the open crowd in general (Howe, 2006). The crowd sourcing offers an opportunity to the general public for offering a decent solution to a particular problem. In exchange of the problem solution the candidate is liable for the prize money (Alonso, Rose, & Stewart, 2008). Companies from different industries have employed and taken advantage of the crowd sourcing such as Canadian Property Holding and the movie organization such as Netflix etc (Gallaugher, 2011). Hence, the usage of the crowd sourcing is employed by the diverse range of companies. It benefits the organization with limited resources commitment to generate the ideas that would otherwise require the organization significant resource commitment (Doan, Ramakrishnan, & Halevy, 2011). It also opened up business opportunity for the other businesses such as Amazon (Gallaugher, 2011). Organization puts up the problem for solution and set prices for it. In addition to the gaining the financial benefit, crowd sourcing also enables the organization in improving the service with a distinctive concept (Vukovic, 2009). For example, the Poke concept of the Facebook has evolved with the employment of crowd sourcing (Gallaugher, 2011). Hence, organizations in the contemporary world are developing methods that requires less dependency on the supplier while adding value to the business in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Such measures also provide organization with the chance to explore the employees with talent critical to the organization (Leimeister et al., 2009). List of References Alonso, O., Rose, D. E., & Stewart, B. (2008, November). Crowdsourcing for relevance evaluation. In ACM SigIR Forum (Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 9-15). ACM. Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A. D., Katz, R., Konwinski, A., ... & Zaharia, M. (2010). A view of cloud computing. Communications of the ACM, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 50-58. Doan, A., Ramakrishnan, R., & Halevy, A. Y. (2011). Crowdsourcing systems on the world-wide web. Communications of the ACM, vol. 54, no. 4, pp. 86-96. Foster, I., Zhao, Y., Raicu, I., & Lu, S. (2008, November). Cloud computing and grid computing 360-degree compared. In Grid Computing Environments Workshop, 2008. GCE08 (pp. 1-10). Ieee. Gallaugher, J. (2011). Information systems: a manager’s guide to harnessing technology. Irvington, NY: Flat World Knowledge Howe, J. (2006). The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired magazine, 14(6), 1-4. Kaiser, T. (2013). Apple’s Chinese suppliers in trouble for environmental pollution. Available from http://www.dailytech.com/Apples+Chinese+Suppliers+in+Trouble+for+Environmental+Pollution/article33103.htm [Accessed 17 December 2013] Leimeister, J. M., Huber, M., Bretschneider, U., & Krcmar, H. (2009). Leveraging crowdsourcing: activation-supporting components for IT-based ideas competition. Journal of management information systems, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 197-224. Nnorom, I. C., & Osibanjo, O. (2008). Overview of electronic waste (e-waste) management practices and legislations, and their poor applications in the developing countries. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 843-858. Plambeck, E., & Wang, Q. (2009). Effects of e-waste regulation on new product introduction. Management Science, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 333-347. Rani, S., & Suri, P. K. (2012). GRID COMPUTING AND CLOUD COMPUTING: DESCRIPTION AND COMPARISION. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Electronics Engineering (IJARCSEE), vol. 1, no. 7, pp. 136. Robinson, B. H. (2009). E-waste: an assessment of global production and environmental impacts. Science of the Total Environment, vol. 408, no. 2, pp. 183-191. Vukovic, M. (2009, July). Crowdsourcing for enterprises. In Services-I, 2009 World Conference on (pp. 686-692). IEEE. Wallace, P. (2011). Commentary: Environmental Justice and the BP Oil Spill: Does Anyone Care About The" Small People" of Color?. The Modern American, vol. 6, no. 2. Available from http://www.wcl.american.edu/environment/WallaceVolume6Issue2.pdf [Accessed 17 December 2013] Widmer, R., Oswald-Krapf, H., Sinha-Khetriwal, D., Schnellmann, M., & Böni, H. (2005). Global perspectives on e-waste. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 436-458. Read More