Digital Goods

• Digital Goods: Digital goods are goods that can be delivered

over a digital network. Music tracks, video, movies, software,
newspapers, magazines, and books can all be expressed,
stored, delivered, and sold as purely digital products.
• In general, for digital goods, the marginal cost of producing
another unit is about zero (it costs nothing to make a copy of
a music file). However, the cost of producing the original first
unit is relatively high.
Database
• Databases and database systems are essential parts of our life. We have been

interacting with non-computerized databases since long time, remember,

looking for a word in a dictionary or finding the telephone number of your

friend from a telephone directory. Computerized databases use computer to

store, manipulate, and manage the database. A database stores information,

which is useful to an organization.

• Database is a repository or collection of related and similar data.

Database stores similar kind of data that is organized in a manner so that

the information can be derived from it, modified, data added, or deleted

to it, and used when needed.

• Some examples of non computerized databases in real life situations are:

dictionary—a database of words organized alphabetically along with their

meaning, telephone directory—a database of telephone numbers and

addresses organized by the last name of people

 A database is …
a collection, or repository of data
having an organized structure

for a specific purpose

What is a Data Warehouse?
• It is also a database that stores current and
historical data of organization to help decision
makers. Data warehouse collects data from
different business operations such as customer
data, manufacturing data and so on.
Continue…
• It also collects data from external sources. After
collecting data it consolidates and standardized data
so that information can be used across the
organization for decision making. It makes the data
available for anyone to access as needed but it can
not be changed.
Continue…
• Data warehouse has also different analytical tools,
query tools, graphical reporting facilities. Business
firm takes long time to implement data warehouse as
it covers entire organization. Implementing data
warehouse requires large amount of money.
Figure of Data Warehouse
Data Marts
• When an organization creates smaller,
decentralized warehouse is called data marts.
Data mart is a subset of a data warehouse. Data
marts usually focus on a single business line or
any part of the organization. For example a
company may develop marketing data marts.
IT Flattens Organizations
• Large, bureaucratic organizations, which primarily developed before
the computer age, are often inefficient, slow to change, and less
competitive than newly created organizations.
• information technology helps flattening by increasing the distribution
of information to empower lower-level employees and increase
management efficiency.
• IT pushes decision-making rights lower in the organization because
lower-level employees receive the information they need to make
decisions without supervision. This empowerment is also possible
because of higher educational levels among the workforce, which give
employees the capabilities to make intelligent decisions.
• Because managers now receive so much more accurate information
on time, they become much faster at making decisions, so fewer
managers are required.
• These changes mean that the management span of control has also
been broadened, enabling high-level managers to manage and control
more workers spread over greater distances.
Information systems can reduce the number of levels in an organization by providing
managers with information to supervise larger numbers of workers
Data Mining
• Data mining is a discovery driven data analysis tools. It finds out
hidden patterns, trends and relationships in large database and
predict future behavior. Patterns and trends are used to make
decision. Data mining software is one of a number of analytical tools
for analyzing data.
What types of information we can obtain from data
mining?
• We usually find five types of information by
using data mining. They are:
• Association
• Sequences
• Classification
• Clustering
• Forecasting
• Associations: some events are linked together or occur together. Such
as when a customers purchase corn chips they also purchased cola
drink 65 percent of the time.
• Sequences: some events are linked over time. For example, when a
customer purchases a house he will purchase refrigerator within two
weeks 65 percent of the time.
• Classification: by examining data firms classify items such as classify
customers as high value customers, low value customers etc.
• Clustering: it is similar to classification. Data mining discover different
groupings such as groups based on demographics.
• Forecasting: data mining usually predict future behavior of customers
and enables one to one marketing or identifying profitable customers.
Cloud computing
• Cloud computing is a method for delivering information technology
(IT) services in which resources are retrieved from the Internet
through web-based tools and applications, as opposed to a direct
connection to a server. Rather than keeping files on a hard drive or
local storage device, cloud-based storage makes it possible to save
them to a remote database.
• It's called cloud computing because the information being accessed is
found in "the cloud" and does not require a user to be in a specific
place to gain access to it. This type of system allows employees to
work remotely. Companies providing cloud services enable users to
store files and applications on remote servers, and then access all the
data via the internet.
• Cloud computing offers large businesses some serious
cost-saving potential. Before the cloud computing,
companies were required to purchase, construct and
maintain costly information management technology
and infrastructure. Now, instead of investing millions in
huge server centers a firm can use cloud computing
and enable workers to interact with the cloud online to
create presentations, spreadsheets and interact with
company software.