July 16, 2014

The Focus and Purpose of Organizational Behavior - Robbins and Judge


Organizational behavior helps potential managers develop the people skills.

Dependent Variables in Organizational Behavior

A dependent variable is the key factor that you want to predict when some other factor is changed.

Productivity, absenteeism, turnover, and job satisfaction are the traditional dependent variables in Organizational behavior.  More  recently, two more variables: deviant work place behavior and organizational citizenship behavior have been added to the list.

July 10, 2014

Personality and Attitudes - Review Notes



Personality and Attitudes - Main Essay


Organizational Citizenship Behavior
Definition by D.W. Organ

Individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization.

The personality foundation for the OCBs are the traits like cooperative, helpful, caring and conscientousness. Employees engage in OCBs to reciprocate the actions of their organizations. Studies found a strong relationship between justice in the organization and OCBs. Procedural justice in the organization creates positive attitudes toward organization and thus prompts employees to engages in OCBs that help in the effective functioning of the organization.





References:
Organ, D.W., Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome, Lexington Books, Lexington, Massachusetts, 1988, p.4 (Definition)
Should I do it or not? An Initial Model of Cognitive Processes Predicting Voice Behaviors by Dan S. Chiaburu et al.
http://www.linnvandyne.com/papers/Chiaburu_Marinova_Van%20Dyne%202008.pdf


Updated  10 July 2014, 4 Dec 2011

July 8, 2014

Code Halos - Book Information, Summaries and Related YouTube Videos


Google Books Link for Browsing

http://books.google.co.in/books?id=dII4AwAAQBAJ

Authors: Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig, Ben Pring

Copyright: Cognizant Technology Solutions
Published by John Wiley & Sons, 2014


Chapter 1 "Will It Happen to Us"?   - An Extinction Event.
Code halo is the field of digital information that surrounds any noun - any person, place, or thing.

More often than not, businesses can generate more value from this digital field around an entity with the currently available technologies. The authors use the term 'Code Halos" to denote products that use the code halo - digital information around entities and create useful information and services. Without doubt they are based on analytics and big data technologies.

Is Your Business Being Disrupted by Code Halos?
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The Code Halos - The Future of Data Science and Analytics.
Dr. Paul Roehrig
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Chapter 3. The Five Business Code Halos

Five types of code halo solutions are emerging from various companies and businesses.

Customer code halos: They provide information related to customers and provide opportunities to sell more based on customer preferences and customised offers. They may provide new product ideas also. They can help in pricing. An airplane may be able to reach a flier who wants to fly if he gets a ticket at less than a price or a ticket on a particular day. It may his comment on a social media platform but the company may be able to pick it up and offer him the ticket.

Product Code Halos: These product provide information on improving the products. Can value engineering ideas come from these products? Yes, We may see big data based value engineering packages that offer suggestions to value engineer your products.

Employee Code Halos: Provide knowledge management capabilities by highlighting your employee skills and achievements that help companies to solve problems in novel ways by connecting people within the organization.

Partner Code Halos: Help connecting supply chain participants to come out with efficiency, effectiveness and innovation.

Enterprise Code Halo: The enterprise halo include the above four products, but it can become the source of market truth for the organization. Are you gaining or losing competitive advantage and market acceptance? Are your products keeping up with the technology or not? What is your company's position in the talent market? Enterprise Code Halos answer these questions in real time and provide the action opportunities to enterprises.

Chapter 4. The Anatomy of a Winning Code Halo Solution

A code halo solution has five essential elements.

1. Amplifier - a device that captures digital data around the entities.

2. Data: The data captured by the amplifier has to be stored in a database.

3. Algorithm:  Analytic engine

4. Application interface: Means to communicate with the user.

5. Business model: How do you monetize the service you are giving to the user.

Anatomy Lessons

1.  Connect an amplifier to every device worth $50 or more.
2. Algorithms are the foundation of the Code Halo experience
3. You need a bigger boat. You need the capability to acquire and analyze big data.
4. Don't Zune out. Microsoft's Zune was abandoned because of an inadequate business model. Put in place a business model for the code halo solution as an integral part.

Chapter 5. The SMAC Stack: The New Technology of Code

SMAC

Social Technologies: Blogs, Wikis,email, instant messaging,social network services and software services that make collaboration and partnering feasible and economical.

Mobile technologies: All portable devices

Analytics technologies

Cloud Computing

SMAC technologies  are giving rise to fifth wave of corporate IT innovation and transformation.

First wave: Main frame computer
Second wave: Mini computers
Third wave: Client Server architecture - ERP
Fourth wave: Internet PC  - E Commerce
Fifth wave: SMAC stack

SNAC Stack
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Chapter 6: The Pattern of Digital Disruption: The Crossroads Model

The stages are:

1. Ionization
2. Spark
3. Enrichment
4. The Crossroads
5. After the Crossroads

The crossroad is when two competitors fight out the final battle. Whoever wins has momentum behind him after the crossroads.

Crossroads Model Explained
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Four Principles for Success in the Code Economy

Delivering Beautiful Products and Experiences
Don't Be Evil 2.0 - Short note by Malcolm Frank in Wall Street Journal Blogs
Winning in the Wirearchy
Make IT Your Halo Heroes

Download a summary of the book - Code Rules - a white paper by the authors of the book circulated in 2013

July 4, 2014

Advertainment - Component of Interactive Marketing - Kotler

Full Definition of ADVERTAINMENT

:  a form of entertainment (such as a movie or television show) that is created primarily to advertise something :  advertisement presented in the form of entertainment.
Merriam Webster Dictionary
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/advertainment



Advertainment: Branded content or brand clips, commercials vignettes that are packaged like mini-movies and barely mention the advertiser’s name are a fast-growing trend.

Advertainment by Spotify

Follow Phoenix

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http://mashable.com/2013/05/14/advertainment/#_


Top 10 Advertainments
http://www.outsourcemarketing.com/my-top-10-advertainment-list/

July 3, 2014

Digital Volunteer Marketing






Digital volunteer marketing can have two interpretations. One is the marketing of products, services and ideas by volunteers in the digital media. They are volunteers in the sense that they take up the activity on their own without any explicit call by the related organizations as digital media provides them an opportunity to do so. Some of them may earn some money out of it. But many are happy to be of service to the society and they are content with the comments and visits to their digital pages. They may spend significant amount of time in this activity. Elections in democracies are events in which digital volunteer marketers are coming forward in large numbers to support the parties they prefer and candidate they prefer. Recently in India (2014), the parties made special efforts to organize these volunteer marketers. They are quite active and vocal on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. There is a good amount of communication between the volunteers also as they are visible on the platform through various search facilities on the platform. Even the casual remarks of the persons become visible on the platform and volunteers can interact with the persons concerned.

Digital volunteer marketing is clearly evident in the case of digital media articles and videos as people are sharing interesting articles and videos.


Digital voluntary marketing can also be interpreted as the use of digital volunteer marketers by a firm. The firm can see this as a channel of marketing communication and organize them. London Olympics 2012 organizers provided a good source of information to digital marketing volunteers especially journalists. Videos and photos were provided to registered journalists for inclusion in their blogs, papers and magazines. Online marketers for goods can make use of this digital volunteer marketing channel. For example, Amazon can use the services of this channel to communicate its new offering say books to potential buyers. Digital marketing volunteers  may review the books and publish it in their blogs. Even now many are doing book reviews on their own. But when amazon recognizes them as a part of their marketing communications channel and provides them advance information regarding its book releases and provides some facilitating material, the volunteer marketers can provide greater benefit to the organization.


Digital Volunteers

Digital volunteers are already popular and Red Cross is using them in an exemplary way. There are case studies describing Red Cross's practices.

Came across an article wherein the issue of using digital alumni volunteers to support their institution is mentioned.
http://higheredlive.com/advancement-live-123-online-ambassadors-and-the-emergence-of-digital-volunteers/

A blog post by a person showing his willingness to be a digital volunteer.
http://tulaneict4d.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/digital-volunteers-and-micro-volunteering/




Research on Digital Volunteers

"Voluntweeters" - Self Organizing by Digital Volunteers in Times of Crisis
A research study on the volunteers activity during Haiti Crisis - 12 Jan 2010
Kate Starbird and Leysia Palen, University of Colarado at Boulder
2011 paper
https://www.cs.colorado.edu/~palen/voluntweetersStarbirdPalen.pdf


Related Article

Word of Mouth Marketing

July 2, 2014

Another Milestone for the Blog - 100 Google +1s - 3 July 2014







You can see g+1 100

Thank you all the advocates of this blog. Your 100 +1s brought a million page views so far. I am sure they will bring one more million in the next three years. Look forward to your continued support and engagement..

July 1, 2014

System Engineering Process and Its Management

Industrial Engineering Article Series

Can industrial engineers design systems internally in IE departments?

They may not be able to design any complex system without the involvement of technical personnel belonging to the area of technology or management. But they can take the role of management of system design.

System Engineering and Industrial Engineering


The definition of Industrial engineering says that it is concerned with design, improvement and installation of systems of men, materials, machines, information, and energy.

Some industrial engineers describe themselves as system designers. Some industrial engineering programs have renamed themselves as industrial and systems engineering. Why such name change was required? Are industrial engineering and system engineering different? If they were different, were they defined differently by the sponsors of these programs? The issue is worthy of exploration.

I advocate that industrial engineering has two core areas of focus: human effort engineering and system efficiency engineering. Therefore, they have a specific role in design of systems of men, materials, machines, information, and energy. The profession included in its definition concern related to design, improvement and installation of systems of men, materials, machines, information, and energy. Can industrial engineers design systems internally in IE departments. They may not be able to design any complex system without the involvement of technical personnel belonging to the area of technology or management. But they can take the role of management of system design.

Hence in industrial engineering curriculums management of system design has to be a subject.

I came across the book, Systems Engineering Guidebook by James Martin published by CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, USA in 1996. This book is a description of a process framework for implementing the methods of engineering a system. This book describes the management of system design adequately to be a beginning point for exploring the subject. This book is also an outcome of the two internal editions of AT&T process document, which was prepared or chartered by the systems engineering process management team. James Martin was Editor-in-Chief for the second edition of the process document.

Definition of Systems Engineering


Systems Engineering (SE) basically consists of four elements:

1. SE Management plans, organizes, controls and directs the technical development of a system or its products.
2. Requirements and Architecture Definition defines the technical requirements based on stakeholder requirements, defines a strucute (or an architecture) for the system components, and allocates these requirements to the components of this architecuture.
3. Development of Sub Systems
4. System Integration and Verification integrates the components of the architecture at each level of the architecture and verifies that the system requirements for those components are met.

At any level in the architecture, a component can be passed to a development team for detail design of that component. Its means IE team will receive the component of human effort engineering and system efficiency engineering during some state of a system's design.

To support systems engineering process four types of teams are typically used.

1. SE Management Team
2. Requirements and Architecture Team
3. Development Team
4. System Integration and Verification Team

SE Management Subprocess


Essential activities of this subprocess are:

Overall objectives of the system design, development and deployment program are defined.

Management processes for various technical activities involved System DDD including methods and techniques for evaluation of effectiveness, risk, quality, and efficiency are specified.

The SE process to be applied to the project is to be documented in a SE Management Plan.

Project's progress will be tracked and managed.

Configuration management (CM) activity will control configuration change requests and the necessary changes to requirements.

Risk management will be undertaken

Requirements and Architecture Definition Subprocess


Essential activities

Customer needs and requirements are ascertained or defined or refined as appropriate.

Assessment of available technologies is done to determine the constraints on the requirements and architecture definition subprocess.

Requirements are analyzed, and are derived and further refined where necessary.

Optimization analysis is done to identify desired characteristics of the system.

System behavior is defined through functional analysis, and functional performance requirements are allocated to these functions.

Architecture is defined and requirements are traced to all system elements.

Requirements for each system element are documented in specifications, drawings and interface documents.

Design. Production and Deployment Subprocess


Eight primary functions are associated with system life cycle. They are development, production, test, deployment, operations, training, support, and disposition. The products in the system engineering process associated with operations are termed as end products and products associated with other phases are termed enabling products.

Core Design teams develop the operations end products and the test enabling products.

Integrated Logistics Support teams develop the support and training enabling products.

Production teams develop the production enabling products.

Deployment teams develop the deployment and disposition enabling products.

System management teams and other teams develop development enabling products.

Systems Integration and Verification Subprocess


Essential Elements

System integration and verification plan is developed.

Test and evaluation requirements are defined.

Test activities are developed for each element.

Integration activities are developed for each pair of elements.


Key Elements of Systems Engineering


1. Systems Engineering Management Plan
2. Systems Engineering Master Schedule - Key Milestones and events
3. Systems Engineering Detailed Schedule - Task oriented schedule.
4. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)- Products and process development plan and due dates.
5. Requirements
6. Technical Performance Measurement: of the system
7. Technical Review and Audits: Technical review of the progress of the project

Key Questions of Systems Engineering


Need

What needs are we trying to fill



Operations Concept

Who are the intended users


Functional Requirements

What specific services will we provide

System Architecture

What elements make up the overall approach?

Allocated Requirements

Which elements address which requirements?

Detailed Design

Are the details correct?
Do they meet requirements?

Implementation

Will the solution be satisfactory in terms of cost and schedule?

Test

What is our evidence of success?


References

James Martin, Systems Engineering Guidebook, CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, USA , 1996.


Updated 1 July 2014, 14 Dec 2011

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System Engineering Course Pages, Articles and Papers

Course on Design in Space Systems http://www.aoe.vt.edu/~cdhall/courses/aoe4065/
A good Presentation on System Engineering http://www.aoe.vt.edu/~cdhall/courses/aoe4065/SE.pdf
The System Architecture Process: http://www.gaudisite.nl/SystemArchitectureProcessPaper.pdf
What is Systems Engineering? A Consensus of the INCOSE Fellows
http://www.incose.org/practice/fellowsconsensus.aspx


Related Knols


Industrial Engineering and Systems Design

System Engineering Process and Its Management
Systems Engineering - INCOSE View

Systems Engineering Fundamentals - Book Information and Review.
Systems Engineering and Management - Smith and Rowland
Systems Efficiency Engineering - A Focus Area of Industrial Engineering
Human Effort Engineering


Originally posted
http://knol.google.com/k/system-engineering-process-and-its-management




Industrial Engineering Knowledge Revision Plan - One Year Plan


January - February - March - April - May - June